Introducing the Episode and Today's Guests

John Dehlin [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories Podcast. I'm your host, John Dehlin. It is August 30, 2023, and today I am super excited to have in studio back on Mormon Stories Podcast, the Lindsay Hansen Park. Hey, Lindsay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:00:15] Hi, everybody. It's good to be back. The last time I was here, I was chewing gum and everybody was mad about it. No gum today.

John Dehlin [00:00:22] You have to twirl your hair.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:00:24] I will be flipping my hair and you're going to have to deal with it. It's a nervous tick.

Bryan Buchanan [00:00:29] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:00:29] And Brian. We have Brian as well.

Bryan Buchanan [00:00:31] What's up, brother?

John Dehlin [00:00:31] Brian McKinnon.

Bryan Buchanan [00:00:32] Hi, everybody. Nice to be back here again.

John Dehlin [00:00:34] Yeah. For those who are super fans, you will know that Lindsay Hansen park has been on Mormon Stories at least three times or more. We talked about your, you know, growing up, eating disorder.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:00:47] I think that was the first stuff.

John Dehlin [00:00:49] And that was all audio. That was before I really recorded every episode in video. Then we had you back to do your polygamy. Right. And then also we've had you on reviewing the gospel topics essays. At least one or two of those, right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:01:00] Yeah, we've done a few of them.

Bryan Buchanan [00:01:02] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:01:02] I'm glad the first one was audio and I'm glad it was because I didn't know how to wear a tank top properly at that point. I was still layering like three or four. No, I think I was not wearing tank tops then.

John Dehlin [00:01:12] So, wow, we've come along.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:01:14] I'm a liberated woman.

John Dehlin [00:01:15] I love it. Yeah. And, Brian, you were just here recently.

Bryan Buchanan [00:01:20] I came with Gary Bergera. We talked about his book that he did. So that was a lot of fun.

John Dehlin [00:01:24] Yeah. So anyway, Lindsay and Brian do all sorts of really cool stuff. Lindsay is the host of youf Polygamy Podcast. She's a former blogger of Feminist Mormon Housewives, which is how I met her. She runs Sunstone and she and Brian together host the Sunstone History podcast, which people love. And then Brian, of course, helps run a Benchmark Books, which is a super cool and important and historic Mormon themed bookstore here in Salt Lake City. Now, Lindsay, what did I miss from you that you would also want to add about myself?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:02:00] Yeah, well, I'm working. I consult on film projects now. That's my new gig.

John Dehlin [00:02:06] So. Under the Banner of Heaven.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:02:08] Under the Banner of Heaven. That was my work. I got to help with that. That was amazing. Working on a new show called American Primeval. But the writers strike, of course, is lingering, so everything shut down. And a few true crime documentaries. It's funny because everybody wants all these Mormon shows. I have to tell people there are so many things happening behind the scenes. There's a lot of Mormon shows that are going to be coming out in the next few years. So that's really exciting.

John Dehlin [00:02:36] Lindsay's bringing Mormonism to Hollywood single handedly.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:02:40] Not single handedly, no. There's so many great people I get to work with and people already doing this work. I just. It's so. It's really fun. The thing that I'm really excited about and probably the most challenging project I'm working on right now is the biography of Juanita Brooks being published with the University of Utah Press. It is almost done. The draft is written. I'm just like polishing it. And so it feels like it'll never be done, but it's almost done.

John Dehlin [00:03:07] And for those who don't know who Juanita Brooks is, because half of our audience has never been Mormon, do you want to give people a quick few sentence?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:03:17] Sure. She's the greatest little American historian of the American West. She was a Mormon housewife in the 1940s whose grandfather was a participant in the massacre. And she decided to tell the truth about the massacre and write the history. She collected over 450 pioneer journals and put them in libraries all over the country. And she wrote biographies on many of the early important settlers, including John D. Lee.

John Dehlin [00:03:44] And that's the Mountain Meadows Massacre. And for those who will be covering Barbara Brown and Rick Turley's new book soon on Mormon Stories podcast, which is a part two of really important work. But the Mountain Meadows Massacre, for those who don't know.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:03:57] Yeah. She was one of the first historians to cover it. It's a massacre of 120ish immigrants, innocent immigrants coming to California through Utah and were brutally murdered by Mormon militias pretending to be Indians. And so that's kind of the gist of it, but it's a lot more complicated than that.

John Dehlin [00:04:18] Men, women and children.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:04:19] Men, women and children. 17 children survived. They left people al under the age of eight. They thought, well, we're gonna talk about it a little bit today too.

John Dehlin [00:04:28] Yeah, well, that's exciting. So we're looking forward to that book coming out. And Sunstone, I hear this past Sunstone was one of the most successful ever.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:04:37] Yeah, this Sunstone was great. You know, Covid kind of messed up conferences in general. And so it was kind of weird getting back in the swing of things. But this last symposium was incredible. We had such incredible speakers, of course, but the mood and the tone and it's almost like people are Learning how to have fun together. It's really important for me to have conversations with people that I disagree with. And Sunstone is that. So that means we have conversations with people all over the spectrum. People will say sunstone's too faithful or Sunstone's too anti Mormon. It's all of those things. We bring in Mormons from all over the spectrum. Our tagline is there's more than one way to Mormon, and that includes Latter Day Saints. And so, yeah, I'm really proud of the work we're doing there, and I'm really proud of the history podcast that Brian and I do, and hopefully people will see that shine through as we talk about the history today.

John Dehlin [00:05:28] Perfect. All right, Brian, what did I miss about you?

Bryan Buchanan [00:05:32] So I like Lindsay. We both wish we had more time for projects because we got a bunch of things going. So the two things I'm doing that I'm really excited about is I'm editing the journals of Michael Quinn, which is a fun project, and then with our friend Christina Rossetti.

John Dehlin [00:05:46] Wait, is that separate from the autobiography that's coming out about him?

Bryan Buchanan [00:05:50] Yes. So what he did is he kept journals from 1972 to 1980, so kind of the heart of his career as a historian.

John Dehlin [00:05:58] Arrington, Camelot.

Bryan Buchanan [00:05:59] Yeah. But then along the way, he did an autobiography in which he drew heavily upon those journals. And so Signature will be publishing that memoir soon. And then I'm editing the journals, which will have just a ton of information about the Arrington years and what was going on then. So that's very fun. And then with our friend Christina Rossetti, I'm also helping to edit the journals of Joseph Musser, who is an important early fundamentalist leader that we'll talk about today.

John Dehlin [00:06:26] So brilliant. Super exciting. Well, y' all are doing good stuff. Really good stuff. All right, so should we go to the main event?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:06:36] The main event.

Why Cover the Full History of Mormon Polygamy

John Dehlin [00:06:37] All right, so we talked about what should be kind of the title of today's episode. We came up with several things, like, wasn't one is One isn't one wife enough? Was that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:06:48] Was that one title, Brian's title? Brian's good at the title.

John Dehlin [00:06:51] Another was everything you should have learned about Mormon polygamy in seminary but didn't. But why don't you guys sort of frame what today's episode is going to be about and kind of why you felt, like, passionately about this topic in particular?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:07:07] Well, as some people know, I did a podcast called Year of Polygamy, which was a terrible name. I know, I know, I know.

John Dehlin [00:07:13] Someone joked I think RFM calls it a decade of polygamy.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:07:16] It really just never. It's not wrong, never. Like, it's that Young Women's Relief Society president impulse in me to, like, make everything a theme. You know, we're like, this year's theme is going to be the gospel. And I did that with polygamy for some reason, and it just keeps going. The history of Mormon polygamy is, I think, the history of Mormonism. People don't like it when I say that, but to me, I see, you know, it's like the sixth sense. I see polygamy everywhere. You really do. You can't escape it with this, with this doctrine and culture. There is.

John Dehlin [00:07:48] I remember when you told me that in one of our UK trips, and I'm like, that's so reductive. But you know what?

Bryan Buchanan [00:07:54] It's.

John Dehlin [00:07:55] I've seen it more and more over the years since you said that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:07:58] It's. It's hard to not see it once you kind of know what to look for. And so this history is really, really important to me, not only because it's changed my life professionally, but it's, you know, my heritage, it's my ancestors. A lot of my friends are now, you know, coming from, leaving fundamentalist groups. I have current friends who are polygamists because the podcast led me to that. And so it's a history that is misunderstood. It's really important to me. And there's this upswing in conspiracy theories and Joseph Smith polygamy denial that's really taking off. And I would say in a concerning way, the arguments are compelling. They are really good at weaving together certain facts to frame a narrative that protects the reputation of Joseph Smith, so that, you know, we can deny that Joseph Smith practiced polygamy, put it all on Brigham Young, and believe you me, I want to blame everything on Brigham Young, but I think that that is a dangerous. A dangerous approach to our heritage. And if we continue to allow that sort of thinking to get oxygen, it's going to have real world consequences to our communities that we care about. And so it's really important to me to get this history out there. So thank you for allowing us to do that.

John Dehlin [00:09:17] Yeah. And maybe, maybe it'll give people a taste of your podcast, both your polygamy and Sunstone history podcast, and they'll want to dive in more because you guys will go into much more depth there than we'll be able to go into today. This is kind of just an overview, right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:09:33] Yeah. So our podcast starts with church history. At the very beginning, we start with the creation. Actually, it really bothers people because we're talking more. They're like, that's not history. We're like, I know, but we have a lot of non Mormons that listen to it too. We cover all of it. And right now, we just finished up Winter Quarters, which everyone thinks is the most boring part of Mormon history, but it's not.

Bryan Buchanan [00:09:54] People are getting hit in the face with shovels.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:09:57] The Mormons were having brothels.

John Dehlin [00:10:00] Who was the woman that was married who was hanging out between Missouri and Illinois that Joseph ended up taking on as a plural wife, but he interacted with her in Missouri?

Bryan Buchanan [00:10:11] That's her.

John Dehlin [00:10:12] Who is it?

Bryan Buchanan [00:10:13] Lucinda Pendleton.

John Dehlin [00:10:14] That's what I was talking about. But obviously Joseph died before Winter Quarters.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:10:19] Now we're going to talk about Winter Quarters here to hopefully get people excited. I thought that that part of history was boring, but it's not.

John Dehlin [00:10:27] Okay, well, I need to spend more time on your Polygamy and Sunstone history podcast, clearly.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:10:32] That's right, you do.

Bryan Buchanan [00:10:33] Don't we all?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:10:34] Don't we all?

John Dehlin [00:10:36] All right. Anything else about kind of why we're doing it today, or should we just dive in?

Bryan Buchanan [00:10:41] One more thing I did want to mention. You mentioned I work at Benchmark Books, and that's one of the things we do on our podcast is we try to highlight the work of historians. So we'll talk about some specific books that have been written that are very helpful for this history and a great place to get those as a benchmark.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:10:56] Can I say something about Benchmark really quick? Buy your books from Benchmark. Don't go to Amazon. Amazon is great. They delivered something to me in three hours yesterday. What a world. But Benchmark is an institution. You in Salt Lake City, they will ship everywhere. Brian, you can call on the phone, meet Brian. He will tell you anything you want about a book support Benchmark. If you're going to buy Mormon books, get it from Benchmark. It supports all of our Mormon publishers and authors. So I'm a huge Benchmark fan.

John Dehlin [00:11:25] Amen.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:11:26] Thanks.

John Dehlin [00:11:27] Yeah. Amen. Yep. All right, well, so we have an amazing outline today of like, I don't know, 1917 major periods in the history of Mormon polygamy. We're probably going to break this up into two, at least two episodes, if not more. But, you know, we don't want to drop four or five hour episodes. Some people don't like that. So we'll see how far we get.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:11:56] For part one, we get the celestial kingdom. Right.

Bryan Buchanan [00:11:58] Three, that's the minimum number of episodes. Yeah. Needed for the celestial kingdom.

John Dehlin [00:12:02] Everything in threes.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:12:03] Everything in.

John Dehlin [00:12:03] Yeah. Okay, so maybe we'll cover up until like the man around the manifesto, and then we'll see if they'll probably be a part two and maybe into a part three. But let's dive in. Okay, so what is this outline? Kind of describe people, the framework for today's discussion.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:12:23] So we want to basically do what I did in year of polygamy in three episodes, maybe two episodes under a year. Everybody. We want to cover the whole history of Mormon polygamy and give you some of that highlights and some things you probably don't know. And so we're going to start at the very beginning with Joseph Smith's family. And we're going to go all the way into modern day and we're going to hopefully try this without notes. So we're going to see. See how far we go.

John Dehlin [00:12:49] Beautiful.

Bryan Buchanan [00:12:50] Yeah. There's just so many connections too, to be made larger U.S. politics, the history of women's suffrage, for example, and all these other things that will. Will be part of this story in ways and connections that you may not have noticed before.

John Dehlin [00:13:04] Wait, so women's suffrage is tied to polygamy?

Bryan Buchanan [00:13:06] What?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:13:06] Y. Yeah. So one of the things that's really fun when I'm doing this work in film now, I get really excited. I'm like the weird Mormon on set all the time. I'm like, you guys, the United States is here because of Mormonism. It's everywhere. People don't realize that Mormon polygamy affected suffrage. Women's vote happened because of polygamy. Homeschool laws in the country happened, thanks to John Singer, Mormon polygamists. The fourth Amendment was shaped by this. The Republican Party was shaped by this. So many laws, so many parts of the history were shaped because of those crazy old Mormons out in the West.

John Dehlin [00:13:45] Brilliant. Well, let's dive in. And I've got the outline. I'm the only one with notes here. I've got the outline. So let's start with who were the members of Joseph Smith's family?

Joseph Smith's Family Background and Early Life

Bryan Buchanan [00:13:57] So the Smith family come from fairly normal background. They're not terribly well off, but they're not poor in the beginning. And then unfortunately, there is an episode where Joseph Smith's father, Joseph Smith Sr. Gets involved in a ginseng buying campaign and that goes bad and they end up losing Lucy's dowry, which was huge. And so from that point forward, they fall on hard times. And from that point forward, they never own their own House again. And so it's. They start to move more to the fringes of society.

John Dehlin [00:14:33] But, Brian, is it fair to say, and Lindsay, too, that they didn't like farming? Because, I mean, on the one hand, you get the sense that they were farmers. On the other hand, you get the sense that they were never. They never quite figured it out. And then there's the idea that you get the sense that they just wish they were doing something else. And we're always trying these cockamamie schemes to get out of having to just do regular old farming. Not that I can judge them, because I'm sure farming in Vermont, New York, isn't fun.

Bryan Buchanan [00:14:58] It's kind of a conflicted heritage. And you can see them at certain points of their life going different ways. And sometimes they push back and say, hey, listen, we cleared 30 acres of farmland in a year. And they say, listen, we were workers. But also, you do sense that from them that isn't there an easier way? Isn't there a more fun life than farming? And they are, I think, trying that for sure.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:15:24] So a lot of things that people don't realize when they talk about early Smith family is the War of 1812. I remember hearing about it in history class, not caring about it. The War of 1812 is a huge part of Mormon history because it was fought over maritime rights, which meant, you know, shipments coming in and out. And as the devastation of the war hits, you know, the east coast, it creates and devastates the economy, who relied on shipments of certain things coming in. And so the entire population kind of like what we're going through now with AI has to shift. So most people shifted into farming and to making beer. Those were really the two big economies on the East Coast. And so you see the Smith family getting into both of those. So at first, they start farming on their Tunbridge farm. And I always like to say, this is the nerdy stuff that I care about. They farmed apples to make ale. And their favorite apples, I think are foreshadowing, called the Blushing maiden apple. And that's what they farmed. And Lucy grew up in a tavern. She grew up knowing how to make beer. She actually had a family beer recipe. And when they quit their farm, they opened this little shop kind of on this, like, turnpike in town that allowed them to sell multiple things. And Lucy sold beer and cakes. That's what she did to survive after farming. And unfortunately, the result of that is that Joseph Smith Sr. Became an alcoholic. And her boys, as we'll talk about, Joseph Smith, had a Huge problem as a young boy with alcohol. There are multiple accounts of that. In fact, he was arrested multiple times. I think his first arrest in 1826 was for disorderly conduct. And you see every time he's arrested in these early years, it involves disorderly conduct. It might involve fraud, like it did in 1830. But my favorite Joseph Smith drunk story is when he's working on the Durfee farm and he's now newly married to Emma Smith. They get married in 1827, and Joseph Smith is supposed to be working and earning money. And instead he steals whiskey from the Durfee cabinet. They have recorded it in their books several times. He was doing this. So Mrs. Durfee puts hot pepper sauce in the whiskey bottle and gives Joseph a huge stomach ache. And that was kind of how they did it. People said that when Joseph Smith drank, he would get angry and he would prophesy, he would talk religion. And Brian maybe can talk more about why that is, because his family, especially his mom, was obsessed with religion.

Bryan Buchanan [00:17:55] And the parents are so interesting because they come at religion very differently. So Joseph Smith Sr. Is more in the universalist camp. It's a looser, kinder sort of religion. But Lucy, after a born again experience, falls into more of a general, traditional Protestant way of thinking of the world. But then she also has this herbal background. And then also on the periphery, you have all this folk magic that they're involved in. And so their religious beliefs are a very interesting conglomeration of all these different traditions. And it's a good microcosm of what's going on in America because you do have all these religious traditions that are floating around them.

John Dehlin [00:18:39] Yeah, so I get mixed messages when I read the history. On the one hand, the church often wants to be pass them off as uneducated, bumbling people that could have never produced the Book of Mormon. Then you read about some of their grandparents or great grandparents and like, whoa, there's some status in some of their genetic heritage. And then also you read about the Dartmouth connection and Hyrum actually attending a school affiliated with Dartmouth and that there were schoolteachers, you know, in the family. And so you really get mixed messages about, like, how bumbling and ignorant and uneducated they were versus potentially, you know, having some education in the family and some status. How do you guys make sense of that?

Bryan Buchanan [00:19:30] Well, part of that goes to a larger point that we'll talk about several times today is the lack of contemporary records for early Mormonism. And so many of these are reminiscent accounts. And so they will later be used as tools in the battle over history. And how do we tell that? And so you'll see that sometimes people will specifically portray them as uneducated for a purpose. But then on the other hand, you'll have other people that are like, no, actually they were better educated than you think for a purpose. And so reminiscent accounts and memory and the nature of how history is written is going to be a theme that will go throughout our discussion.

John Dehlin [00:20:09] So agenda really drives what historical tidbits people. Is that fair?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:20:14] I think there's also a bias that we have in general when it comes to class of people. My work with different fundamentalist groups all over the American west has put me in contact with some of the poorest communities in our country. Places that you're like, this is America. How are people living like this? And we're talking, you know, I've met folks with entire generations who have not been taught to read, but you cannot tell me that those people aren't intelligent or smart, especially people connected to the land. And I think that Joseph Smith had both of those. One of the things, this is a good example of what Brian was talking about, documentation. Very few people realize that when Joseph Smith, he has that famous leg surgery, he's eight years old, he goes to convalesce with his uncle who lives, I think, in Massachusetts or somewhere on the East Coast. He's right in the harbors of the 1812 war. He is there interacting with. With soldiers, with generals, with war, with trauma, with death every single day as 8 years old. And so he's getting news, he's getting information, he's getting things that we don't realize are seeping into this young boy's mind. Things like that are happening to all of the Smith family. They're all having these experiences with different people. And so that's part of it. But there's also, I mean, we're going to talk about Sidney Rigdon and Martin Harris and all these other influences that were sort of, you know, the educated class. But rural folk who have the Bible today and back then are obsessed with theology in a way that we don't understand now because we have so many, many other distractions.

John Dehlin [00:21:50] Yeah. All right, last question. Then we'll jump to the treasure digging, money digging stuff. This is obvious, probably a really obvious question, but I've never asked it before. Why didn't Joseph Smith get a decent education? Why wasn't he good at reading and writing? We know he was good at speaking and storytelling, but what, you know, why did Oliver Cowdery get a great education, but Joseph Smith didn't in terms of, like, formal education. And do we know.

Bryan Buchanan [00:22:16] I think part of that is the requirements of the farm. And after their finances take a downturn, it's a pretty hardscrabble existence. And, you know, there are times when they're trying to make payments on a farm that they're trying to purchase.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:22:31] And.

Bryan Buchanan [00:22:31] And so, you know, they will hire out as laborers, as day laborers. And so, as is often the case in agricultural communities, school is an afterthought after the farm. If there's time, great. And a lot of that is geared to when the farm is most active. If it's harvest time, you're not going to school. Wintertime, maybe.

Money Digging, Folk Magic, and Early Treasure Seeking

John Dehlin [00:22:53] Okay, well, I think this leads us to. Naturally to the discussion of money digging and treasure digging, because I think that was, in my mind, it's tied to the farming not working out and them needing an income. But I don't want to steal your thunder. So how does that start and what goes on there?

Bryan Buchanan [00:23:11] Yeah, and this is another fantastic example of where we're mostly dependent on reminiscent accounts for this. And they're filtered through the lenses of what happens to Joseph Smith and Mormons later on. So we do have to keep that in mind. But the folk magic is so fascinating because a lot of this is thoughts and beliefs and practices that had been more accepted earlier, but then have moved more toward the fringes of society, just like the Smith family has moved to the fringes of society. And so these were things that were considered respectable maybe a generation or two before, but now are starting to be seen as a little less normal, maybe. And it does seem to go to that idea of maybe this is a better way to make a living than farming. And then we also have these fascinating accounts of Joseph Smith seemingly seeing people around him that do this. You have Lumen Walters that comes to town with this fantastic story, and his is a much more developed Persona and routine. But then you have people like Sally Chase, that's a neighbor, and people that are, you know, little lower level. But then in the public eye, it starts to be seen as very negative connotations. These are jugglers, these are conjurers. These are dangerous frauds. And so it's this weird, liminal space that it's in at the time, and they're right at the middle of it.

John Dehlin [00:24:39] Do either of you have a sense for whether the Smiths believed that they were actually seeing spirits and seeing buried treasure? Because a lot of people these days believe all sorts of weird things. That they genuinely believe. So it's easy to jump to fraud. But sometimes people just believe weird things.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:24:58] I think there are a lot of explanations. I've heard so many theories over my tenure at Sunstone. One of them that I think is really interesting, I did an episode in a year of polygamy with a person, Aaron Sullivan, who could see angels, he could see Jesus, and then he took medication and they went away. And he believes, and I do now, after meeting so many prophets, that there is a contingent of society that are having a neurological event who are seeing things. And maybe we all are on that spectrum. That's why you saw a ghost once as a kid or you've never seen a ghost. There's probably something to that. With the Smith family, though I like to cite a few things. First of all, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, you know, that time period, this is the time period we're talking about those stories. Irving Washington is this time period. People really believed that there were ghosts and spooks and haunts. This was post Revolutionary War. They were a traumatized people. They had to make sense of the dead and so communing with them and all of this. And plus, you know, they're also dealing with the impacts and their guilt of colonization. So what does it mean to displace all of these native people with all this lore and treasure in Spanish, Treasure buried everywhere. So you've got that in the Ethereum for Joseph Smith specifically. I don't think it's as simple as fraud or belief. Right. That dichotomy doesn't work if you understand his father's failure with the ginseng thing and how devastating that was to the family. Joseph Smith Sr. Gets drunk a lot, especially after this. He starts making promises on these treasure digs that he cannot, you know, follow through on. And in my opinion, Joseph Smith wants to validate his dad. He wants his dad to not be a fool. Who amongst us would want to see our dad humiliated like that? And so my take, this is just my personal take based on the evidence that I've seen. Joseph Smith wanted to make his dad's crazy ideas true, so he made them true. If they did a treasure dig, they would find stuff that they said would be there because they were done being the laughingstock of the family, of the community. And I can understand that. I've met people who have not been given the same resources and education as other people and feel like they're just as worthy and are not given an opportunity to be so. And I think that that motivated him, that he saw other people around him succeeding and he knew that he was smart and he probably resented the way that they treated him. And I think that you can see that attitude turn into entitlement throughout his lifetime and lead to some really terrible things.

John Dehlin [00:27:39] Yeah, I know super smart people that, for example, use a medium to talk to the dead and they're super smart, credible people.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:27:46] So like I'm a mystic. I light candles to my ancestors every night. I read tarot. I've become the ex Mormon trope. But there's something about it. But I also do think that there are some critical points in Joseph Smith's time where he makes decisions of am I going to lie or am I going to tell the truth? And he lies. I think.

John Dehlin [00:28:12] Yeah. Bryan, I'm curious what you make of the Isaac Hale affidavit that where it's claimed that Joseph Smith expressed regret and that he never saw anything in the stones. Some people like to dismiss that. To me it seems kind of credible that maybe Joseph admitted to his father in law that it was a shenanigan.

Bryan Buchanan [00:28:30] You know, it's so hard to figure out what exactly his, his motives and his, his what's going on there. I do think one element to it that doesn't get talked about enough is just the element of, of fun and adventure. And another element is this is the land of Captain Kidd and pirate stories. And so, you know, at this point, Joseph is still young. And as a kid I loved digging. I loved, you know, and he's not, he's still a kid for the most part. But I do think what's so fascinating about it is how the rituals around it develop and become more canonized, if you will. So, you know, you have these stories of they'll put stakes in a circle and there's blood involved. Sometimes it's animal sacrifice. But what I think is so fascinating is you look at specific treasure digs and there was always something that went wrong and it didn't work out. Someone did something wrong, they didn't do the ritual quite right. Something was always just a little bit off that, you know, they hit the chest but then it disappeared. And all these stories and they're just so close, just right there.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:29:37] My favorite one is what Chris Smith talks about how the family was really poor and starving. The Smith family, they do a treasure dig and Joseph Smith just discerns that they need to have a sacrifice of a lamb. And that night the Smith family dined on mutton. I think, I mean, that's fraud, right? But also extreme poverty like that frontier poverty, it was a shifting economy. We call it the era of good feelings. Almost ironically, everybody was drunk, everyone was depressed, everyone was struggling. That does not justify what he does. But I do think it gives some context to how it happened.

Joseph Smith's Early Romantic Controversies

John Dehlin [00:30:14] Well, the next point is interesting is Joseph Smith's guilt and predilection for the ladies. So, first of all, I never knew that there was alcohol involved in that sort of 1820s treasure digging, shenanigans stuff. But how did the ladies get involved early on?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:30:32] Yeah. So Joseph Smith has a reputation for a lot of his life for disorderly conduct, I guess. And that includes women. He has an issue with women. His early journals are filled with confessions to God, lots of guilt, lots of I'm a sinner stuff. And some, you know, historians will say, well, that was just common for the time, which it was, but so was men visiting brothels. That was quite common. Especially frontier people. And we gotta understand Joseph was a frontier kid. Have you hung out with really, really rural kids? Like, I don't care if they go to church. They've got a morality, a lot of folks do, that sort of doesn't always match up with the Bible. You go to church on Sunday and whatever. So that accusation that Joseph Smith liked young ladies is so scandalous to people, but to me, it makes them very human. Now, the problem is when he gets married, he gets married in 1827 to Emma Smith. Her parents don't like it, of course, and they try to give him chances.

John Dehlin [00:31:36] They have to elope.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:31:37] Because they have to elope.

John Dehlin [00:31:38] Emma's dad's just not down with it. Right? Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:31:40] And I think, you know, when we're trying to understand Emma, we have to understand the humiliation she's gonna go through as this happens. You don't get divorced then. And if you do, it's a scandal. Emma comes from a certain amount of genteel status and she's really marrying below that Joseph Smith. There's a story within the first two years of the marriage. I think it's within the first year he tries to seduce her friend Eliza Winters, one of her best friends, and is accused of doing that. You have accounts from neighbors of the Hales saying that Emma Smith comes to them crying and saying, I've made a mistake. I don't know what to do. How do I get out of this? I mean, that's a really hard situation.

John Dehlin [00:32:22] Implying they may have had some exploration themselves. Is that what you mean? Or not?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:32:28] No meaning or just marrying Joseph, marrying Joseph. Meaning she regrets it. She knows that she's gotten herself into a troublesome boy. Like if he's hitting on your best friend, even if he's just hitting on him, I mean, Eliza Winters. There are rumors, accounts that he might have done more when he's on the stoll. The Josiah Stowell dig. He's arrested in 1830 for disorderly conduct and fraud. And some of the witnesses against him are two of Josiah Stoll's daughters.

John Dehlin [00:32:56] Could that have been 1826ish? Do I have the dates right? Was it 1830?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:33:00] 1826.

Bryan Buchanan [00:33:01] There's two separate trials. The 1826 is the glass looker one, and then the 1830 is the south Bainbridge. That's the one where the stoil daughters tested.

John Dehlin [00:33:09] So that was an 1830 dig.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:33:11] 1830 trial.

John Dehlin [00:33:13] Trial, trial.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:33:14] So he's arrested.

John Dehlin [00:33:15] Got it. Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:33:16] And as part of the arrest. So we don't have any extant documents of what was said at the trial. We only have the receipts of the fees and the court. But we do know that two of Josiah Stowell's daughters, Miriam and Rhoda, 23 and 21, I think, testified that Joseph Smith was in public and private, inappropriate to them. What that means, we don't know because we don't have documentation. Joseph Smith later on says, no, they testified for my character, not against my character. He's married. In fact, I think their first child, stillborn, is Alvin is born in 1830. Is that right? Am I getting that right? So he's having public accusations with at least on record that we know of three women at this point. That's not nothing. And this is what I like to tell critics or sorry, apologists who are like, you know, those are anti Mormon sources and you can't take this. All right, when someone is accused of as many things as Joseph Smith, how many do we give him? Do we give him five? And we say those are all made up because then we've got 45 to go on. You know, like, I think it makes sense that these are true, especially as we get into the Kirtland era where Joseph Smith is even admitting himself to extramarital intermarital polygamous marital interactions with other women. I don't know how we're going to call them. But yeah, early on in his marriage, he does these things. And I think this is where he starts offering Emma a chance to be involved. And do you want to talk about the Jacob too theory that we were talking about with Eliza Winters?

Bryan Buchanan [00:34:55] Eliza Winters is fascinating. So what happens in that case is in 1834. Emma's cousin Levi Lewis swears this affidavit where he says, this is where the Eliza stuff comes from, that there was something going on there. And then we pair that with the other account that says that she was really good friends with Emma and with these early things. If they existed in a vacuum, it would be one thing. But then as we compare those to how behavior develops in later, better documented periods, you start to see the themes develop. And Eliza Winters will later sue Martin Harris for accusing her of having an illegitimate child. And that sounds very much like the Nauvoo playbook of if advances are spurned, then we go on the offensive and call her a whore.

John Dehlin [00:35:44] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:35:45] And Martin Harrison, Joseph Smith, during this time with Eliza Winters, famously said, there's no crime in adultery. This is my theory. This is a radical theory. Any historians want to, like, discredit this by a piece of information? I don't know. But Joseph Smith is translating the Book of Mormon at this point. We always say, well, Jacob too says monogamous marriage. And that contradicts later on. Well, we do know that Joseph Smith liked to write scripture to appease people in his life after he's made mistakes or made them mad. What if Jacob too is a response to Eliza Winters?

John Dehlin [00:36:20] I mean, to make Emma feel better?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:36:22] That is just a theory, but I think it makes sense, like you said, in a pattern of behavior.

Bryan Buchanan [00:36:28] If those accusations are true, it is the exact same time frame that the Book of Mormon is happening.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:36:35] And Emma's worried about leaving him too.

Bryan Buchanan [00:36:38] There's clearly tensions there from the get go. And I always find it fascinating with that Jacob 2 passage where you'll find writers who will say, this is a categorical denunciation of polygamy, and every time

John Dehlin [00:36:49] it says, unless the Lord has a purpose. Right.

Bryan Buchanan [00:36:51] I hear that. And I think, do we need to go back to the reading rodeo because. And you read sermon after sermon in the 19th century in Utah where Erastus Snow will quote these verses and say, you know, otherwise, you know, I will command my people. He says, guess who's being commanded to do it? Us, right here, now.

John Dehlin [00:37:10] Right.

Bryan Buchanan [00:37:12] So, yeah, at least as early as 1829, if not earlier. Polygamy is on Joseph Smith's mind. That's clear.

John Dehlin [00:37:18] Yeah. And I'll just say one quick shout out. One of the most controversial episodes on Mormon stories ever with the late Grant Palmer. I had him on, and the episode was called Grant Palmer on sexual allegations against Joseph Smith, William and Jane Law and his resignation. And I remember Brian Hales like Lost his mind when this episode came out, just because it basically, Grant Palmer back then made the claim that Joseph Smith had a lot of sexual shenanigans long before polygamy ever really happened. And it sounds like maybe the evidence is that there's something to that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:37:54] So, anyway, well, again, God bless Grant Palmer. Such a sweet man. His. He has an unpublished paper where he talks about the sexual indiscretions of Joseph Smith, and it is wrought with problems. So, however. However, there are problems that don't undermine these points. And because it is not peer reviewed, and I don't know why he could have corrected, I mean, small errors. Give us an example of one.

Bryan Buchanan [00:38:21] Well, the one I noticed is talking about the Levi Lewis affidavit. I thought, I recognize that sentence. It's lifted from Mormon Polygamy by Richard Van Wagner. But again, this is a private, unpublished paper. We shouldn't make too much out of this.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:38:37] And all historians have, you know, drafts and things. But that is used often to discredit his work because he cites these stories. But it's in Dan Vogel's new book. You can read about the Stowell sisters. We were looking for documentation on that. So, yeah, we'll play the document source game with apologists all the time because they'll say, well, that was one source given so many years later. I'm like, okay, but you do that with W. Phelps Lamanite Revelation. So what are the rules here?

Bryan Buchanan [00:39:07] Yeah, and this is another larger point, too, is it's Mormon history and specifically Mormon polygamy. History is so hard because very often the writer is either trying to argue that Joseph Smith was a prophet or that Joseph Smith wasn't a prophet. And that's a problem because neither of those approaches is history. Those are both apologetics on other sides of the coin. And that's the hardest part, is trying to do this in a dispassionate, fair, balanced way. And that is difficult because we have reminiscent accounts, we have contradictory accounts, we have lack of accounts, and so it is a very fraught history.

John Dehlin [00:39:46] Yeah, well, I'm not always a fan of the claim that where there's smoke, there's fire. But certainly in Joseph Smith's case, there seems to be a lot of smoke, and we know there's fire, too.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:39:56] So, well, let's throw it up on the board. Today you get five. You take five things that we say, and you discount them, and then we'll keep the rest and see what the scoreboard is.

John Dehlin [00:40:06] All right, well, the last point in this section is, again, Joseph Smith Drinking alcohol on the job and prophesying in other family troubles. Do we want to.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:40:15] Oh, yeah. I think I kind of just covered that. Just the sad thing to me that I didn't realize. And again, I can hear people. They're like, she says, he's an alcoholic. I don't have to listen to anything she says anymore. They were human beings in a very fraught cultural time who grew up drinking alcohol. As children, you used it for medicine. You used it a lot. Of course, Joseph Smith Sr. Was an alcoholic. He couldn't keep it together.

John Dehlin [00:40:41] Was beer safer than water? Was it that kind of thing or not?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:40:44] I think it wasn't just that. It was what your family did. I mean, it was around. It's stored easier. So I guess, yeah, it was safer than water. But with Joseph Smith Sr. I was surprised to learn how bad his alcoholism was. I mean, we're talking even into later periods of the church. He would go missing for days at a time, and the Smith family wouldn't know where he was. And then he would show up at his member's house. And you see this in the Revelations. Joseph Smith is really trying to give dignity to his father. And when I'm trying to be charitable to the man, the human of Joseph Smith, the wound, wounded child of Joseph Smith, it's a man trying to cover up for his alcoholic father a lot. And I think that Joseph Smith early on was going down that road. I think the appearance of Martin Harris having someone of stature believe in him probably turned the corner for him. Unfortunately, not in the best direction. But Joseph Smith did seem to handle alcohol better than his father later on. Not as a kid, though.

John Dehlin [00:41:46] Yeah. If your dad's an alcoholic and you're on the frontier, it's likely that the kids are fighting the alcohol around and probably trying it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:41:54] There are several accounts of him, and they said he would get drunk and preach. And I think it's almost endearing if it wouldn't turn into what it turned into.

John Dehlin [00:42:02] Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so the next section is early church. We've talked about Jacob in the Book of Mormon. Is there anything else we want to say about that? Because I do have a question, but did we already cover. Okay, so you hear about a community, a polygamous community that lived in what in the New York State area surrounding Joseph Smith? Is it the Oneida community? Who was that and what was going on there?

Sexuality and Religion in Early America

Bryan Buchanan [00:42:27] So at this point, you have, in addition to this multiplicity of religious beliefs and traditions, you have differing ideas about sexuality that are going on and how they intersect with religion. So in some cases with. With shakers, with the New Harmony group, go the celibacy route. And that's one option. Then you have the other. The Oneida community, They're starting around this time, but it's more as they're leaving to go to Utah that they really ramp up. But then you also have a group up in Maine, the Jacob Cochrane Group, the Society of Free Brethren and Sisters, who opt for something like complex marriage. And that. That starts to look more like what Mormons are doing. And so there certainly is this culture milieu of these things floating around them that undoubtedly they're hearing about and thinking about and talking about. And that's if Joseph Smith did nothing else. He was sort of a cultural sponge that was seeing all this stuff going around him and then mixing that in with what Mormonism was doing.

John Dehlin [00:43:32] I guess now that I hear that, I wonder if those groups were pegged as illegal, shut down, whether they experience persecution for their sexual experimentation. Do we know?

Bryan Buchanan [00:43:42] Absolutely. The group up in Maine for sure got themselves into trouble. And what's so fascinating about that particular group is Mormons then go interact with them. And there are missionaries that go up there. Samuel Smith, Orson Hyde, Brigham Young goes up there. What's so fascinating?

John Dehlin [00:43:57] Lindsay, you're smiling. Why are you smiling, Lindsay?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:43:58] No, I just. I like this story.

John Dehlin [00:44:00] Okay, okay.

Bryan Buchanan [00:44:01] That becomes. Then they are the ones that bring it back, and they're the ones that introduce polygamy to Mormonism. And Joseph Smith has nothing to do with it. This is a very common polygamy denial argument.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:44:09] It's all, Brigham Young, baby.

Bryan Buchanan [00:44:11] It doesn't hold water. But to do that, you have to think that Joseph Smith is somehow walled off from all of this while everyone else isn't, which is nonsense.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:44:21] I do want to say one thing about this, because I think people need to understand that after the Revolutionary War, it did something. It cut us off from England, the Church of England. And all of a sudden, it leaves sort of this religious vacuum. And it wasn't just that the rights of Americans were now democratized. Religion became democratized. No longer did you need the state to come in and say, this is what God says to you. It became every man's thing. And that's what's happening in these cultures. Everyone's like, wait a minute, we can commune directly with God. And this is so normal to us now as Americans. But this was a really radical idea at the time, and that's why you see preachers popping up everywhere. And as we talk about Sidney Rigdon, There becomes a debate between the school, clerically trained, educated preachers versus your town drunk who gets really saucy and knows his Bible, and who do you believe? And you have people following both. So it's a really interesting time in America.

John Dehlin [00:45:16] Okay, okay. So when you mention rumors in the early church, what are we talking about there? There's rumors of polygamy. Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [00:45:25] And this is another one of those great cases where the lack of contemporary records makes it more difficult. But the Eliza Winters is one that occasionally gets mentioned, but not very often. And it is such a fascinating case because if you connect some of the accounts, it does seem like there was a friendship there. And so, again, as we move into Kirtland, into Nauvoo, these women that were friends with Emma, Eliza Snow, does seem to be a pattern that is there. So there's that one you have. There's this down the scale a little bit. There's a woman that was living in Pennsylvania that was thought Joseph Smith came through and some sort of relationship, and then he gets run out of town. But we only have a single reference from, like, 65 years later. And so in all these cases, we have to sort of weigh evidence. And how much weight do we give to this and that history ends up becoming just as much an art form as it does science.

John Dehlin [00:46:25] So in the original Book of Commandments, I want to think it's section 111, but there's a denunciation of polygamy. And it says. Doesn't it say, in response to rumors and allegations, like, that's evidence that there are rumors and allegations. Did I get the section right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:46:42] So the church is founded April 30, 1830. 1830. Two years later, we have the tar and feather incident, which we're gonna talk about. Which it's a little dubious, the claims, but we do know that the claims were real enough to make people think that Joseph Smith had an issue with women. We also have, as we get into, I guess, the Kirtland period with Fanny Alger. Alger. We've been corrected by the Senate. It's allr. There's also a Ms. Hill that gets conflated. And some historians believe that those are the same women. They're Fanny Algar. Some people believe they're different. But we do know that by this point, just two years after the church's founding, Joseph Smith already has such a reputation for being seducing ladies that it plays into this tar and feather incident in 1832.

John Dehlin [00:47:35] Did I get the Book of Commandments section? Right?

Bryan Buchanan [00:47:38] So there's the section on marriage in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. And that's a fascinating one because Joseph Smith is apparently out of town when that's done. Is that by design so that he doesn't have to be on the ground when that happens?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:47:52] And Sidney Rigdon's involved by that point, and he had a different marriage ethic?

John Dehlin [00:47:58] We'll say, yeah, okay. All right. Okay. So let's talk, if it's all right. Let's talk about the 18th 1831 Lamanite revelation, because that's significant in my mind.

Early Plural Marriage Revelations and the Kirtland Era

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:48:11] Okay. Yeah. So this is allegedly the first time that Joseph Smith develops a formal, somewhat formal doctrine around plural marriage. And the idea is, in 1831, Joseph Smith sends seven missionaries out to convert the Lamanites, the indigenous tribal bands around them, to the gospel. This is not a new idea. This is just the idea of the Book of Mormon. And W.W. phelps, good old William Wines Phelps, later on records that Joseph Smith claims that he had a revelation that the men were to go and marry Lamanites and Nephites as a sort of way to assimilate them and fulfill the promises of the Book of Mormon. Now, this account is 35 years later.

Bryan Buchanan [00:48:55] 30 years later.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:48:55] 30 years later. So this is the joke I was making earlier. It's funny because a lot of faithful apologists will use this date to say, no, no, no. All the Fanny Augur, all of it is a marriage. It's not an affair because of this 1831 revelation. But you give anyone else outside the church an account that's given 30 years later, and they don't count it. This one, for some reason, we count. We don't have an accident document of it. We just have William Wines Phelps recording it years later.

John Dehlin [00:49:25] Okay, so what do you think? Because that idea of missionaries sort of being sent to the frontier and telling them, hey, if you pick up a little Native American concubine on the side, no harm, no foul, that's kind of problematic.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:49:40] I mean, there are a lot of problematic things that Mormons end up doing with the indigenous cultures around them. So do I believe that it happened? Probably only because it becomes folk culture. There's. There's stuff formalized later in the canon, but we have, as we'll talk about in the Utah period, many instances and debates between the elders talking about, is it okay to marry lame knight women? And of course, it doesn't go the other way around. Right. They don't want brown men marrying white women. They only want white men marrying, you know, brown women. Not Black women, because that's a different cultural discussion. But it does reflect the sort of racism and Manifest Destiny culture of the time, which was that you could sort of take whatever you wanted, including, you know, indigenous women, and it would be a gift to them, it would be a service to them. And of course, they don't have any say. But as far as we know, in 1831, nobody did take a Lamanite wife.

John Dehlin [00:50:44] Okay. So there's no evidence of anyone actually doing it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:50:46] Yeah, just.

John Dehlin [00:50:47] Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:50:48] Just a couple years later, after the Missouri period, and as they start doing missions to the Cherokee, there are a few handfuls of missionaries that will marry, but usually it's biracial women. Women who have maybe an indigenous father and a white. Sorry, indigenous mother and a white father or something like that.

John Dehlin [00:51:06] Okay. Anything you want to add to that, Brian Phelps.

Bryan Buchanan [00:51:11] It would be a little easier if there were anybody but Phelps giving us this information, because back to the topic of patterns. Phelps has this history of embellishing. He liked to be the center of attention, and so he was a drama man and a drama man.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:51:30] He used to slither around on his stomach in the temple.

Bryan Buchanan [00:51:33] Best serpent they ever had. So, yeah, he's a problematic person because of that. So I'm with Lindsay. I think it did happen exactly the way. The fact that he can remember the exact revelation text 30 years later, I'm gonna doubt that part.

John Dehlin [00:51:48] Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:51:49] So just like Joseph Smith when he talked about the gold plates, at first it was a treasure spirit, a ghost, and then a treasure spirit and then, you know, an angel. Joseph Smith was very known for taking men out into the woods and telling ghost stories and appropriating indigenous stories with Spanish lore. So I think he was doing this with these revelations as well.

John Dehlin [00:52:10] Okay. And just to correct the record, I think I said section 111. It was section 101, and it was in the 1835 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants, and it lasted up until the 18, what, 60s or 70s. Like, it was in there for a

Bryan Buchanan [00:52:23] long time when section 132 goes in.

John Dehlin [00:52:26] Right, right. But the text says, in as much as this Church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife and one woman, but one husband, except in the case of death, and either is at liberty to marry again. And that's problematic because this remains Scripture throughout the entire Kirtland, Missouri, and Nauvoo period, through Utah, Brigham Young, polygamy, like that's. That should have been removed. Right.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:52:58] By 1835, Joseph Smith has three to six allegations, depending on who you believe, of extramarital relationships with women. But I attribute this to Sidney Rigdon. He had a lot of hand in the creation of this and he was very sure that monogamy was the way to go.

John Dehlin [00:53:16] Yeah, it seems like, you know, I often like to talk about informed consent and how, like there's basic historical facts that everyone deserves to know if they're going to join the church or be raised in the church. The fact that section 101 used to be there while polygamy is being practiced and then it was removed and replaced with DNC 132, that seems like one of those really important pieces of information that everyone should know. I don't know because it's pretty significant anyway.

Bryan Buchanan [00:53:44] Well, and that's, that's a theme that will definitely come up again and again is the question of the public facing messaging versus what's happening in private. And that is a dichotomy that will come up again and again and again.

John Dehlin [00:53:56] Well, let's jump to the Courland era and the the bullet is the family in quotes. I'm dying to know what that is.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:54:03] I love this story because we like to think, like, if you go to your ward today and you listen to your high councilman talk and just drone on up there, God bless you. I'm not trying to denigrate anyone's dentist in their ward. Right. I'm sure you're a great guy, but it's boring and it's stuffy and dusty. Sidney Rigdon was not that he was a charismatic guy. He was interested in the time. Like I said, there was this democratization of religion. And so he would attend these debates between like Alexander Campbell and Robert Owen and they would debate what the new Christianity looked like. And you know, Robert Owen had a lot of ideas that Sidney Rigdon didn't agree with. Alexander Campbell liked this idea of communal stuff. And Sidney Rigdon loved this idea. He was a hippie. Early Mormons were hippies. You got to think about it like this. They really were. So Sidney Rigdon goes to Mentor, Ohio. He finds Isaac Morley, who has a farm. Him and Lyman White and about four other families start to practice this communal order. And they call themselves the family or the big family. And it's this big cooperative and they're living like hippies. And if Bryce Blinkenagle and Cody Nakone are to be believed, maybe they're dabbing the plant medicine, who knows? But they are hippies. They really were. It was free exercise of shared goods. The family becomes all one family. I think that the one thing they were missing, that piece was free love. But that's gonna come later.

Bryan Buchanan [00:55:35] What's funny is if you go to the church history museum and talk to just the right person, down in the basement, they have a wagon that's painted just like the Partridge Family bus, and that's how they got it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:55:44] That is not factually accurate. That is a lie.

Bryan Buchanan [00:55:48] This is. Again, the larger point is, as you are grappling with what the Bible means in current religion of the 1830s, that's very difficult because you have this idea in acts of a community of believers who have all things in communion. What does that mean? And so that's where these communal ideas are floating around. And if you hew more literally to the Bible, that then we should be doing that too.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:56:16] Sorry to interrupt. That's the debate between Alexander Campbell and Sidney Rigdon. They start to knock heads over these ecstatic gifts. Alexander Campbell thought that those things like speaking in tongues and blessings and miracles were things of the past, not Sidney Rigdon. He was into it. And so was some of his converts, like Eliza Snow. So you have Sidney Rigdon building this congregation of hippies, and that's when the missionaries parley. Pratt and I forget, who was it, Heber? They show up and they convert this congregation of hippies, and that becomes the huge body of the church.

John Dehlin [00:56:53] And so that's kind of communal. And is the point that once you're talking about communal finances, the way humans work, kind of sexuality often follows when it's a. When it's sharing all things, maybe they start to really think, okay, all things. I mean, is that why it's listed here as part of the bullet?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:57:13] Well, so that's the. I think it's important because Sidney Rigdon, that is the school of thinking he comes up in, and he's of status there. And the one thing that I really wish people would understand about early Mormon history that I've come to learn is Mormonism is as much Sidney Rigdon's church as it was Joseph Smith's at this time. Because once those two team up, Sidney really provides the theological underpinnings, the training, the smarts, the credibility. I mean, he was theology. Right, the theology. He was smart and charismatic, and he had a large following, and he was very well respected as a religious leader.

John Dehlin [00:57:49] And he knew how to run a church. Right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:57:50] He knew how to run a church. He was classically trained. And here you have this ragtag Joseph Smith, the everyman guy, and together they become a really compelling team, and they sort of play off each other. Now, of course, Joseph Smith is like, communal great. This is great. But he is the one that brings in the sort of free love ideas. Or John C. Bennett, if you believe that whoever it is that introduces the ideas, Sidney Rigdon is like, whoa, whoa, that's too far. That's too far. And that becomes a huge problem in Nauvoo later on.

John Dehlin [00:58:20] Yeah, yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [00:58:21] And that's another element of grappling with what does the Bible do? Because in the New Testament, you have the communal ideas. You don't really have the polygamy ideas. That's Old Testament. And so grappling with how to deal with these different portions of the Bible, which is, of course, not a coherent whole. I believe Mr. Dan McClellan can speak to that. Then they have to decide how do we deal with these differing ideas from different time periods that sometimes are contradictory? And so one person is like, well, I think. I think this part needs to be emphasized. The only person, like, what about this part? And so we get conflicts that arise of what to emphasize more.

John Dehlin [00:59:01] Yeah, yeah. That surprised me. When Dan McClellan basically said, during the time period of the Old Testament, everyone was practicing polygamy, I was like, whoa. Like, I didn't realize it was as prevalent as Dan suggests that it is.

Bryan Buchanan [00:59:14] Oh, your Mormon leaders in the Utah period would be happy to tell you about that.

John Dehlin [00:59:19] Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it wasn't necessarily a religious thing. It was more just a cultural thing. Muslims are doing it. Like, I'm sure civilizations apart from Christians or Jews and Muslims were also doing it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:59:31] So I think it'd be accurate to say that different cultures had different marriage structures. That's how I would phrase it.

John Dehlin [00:59:37] Sure, sure.

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:59:38] Yeah.

John Dehlin [00:59:38] Okay. All right. Well, in Kirtland, the Fanny Auger situation is really significant because some want to say it was an affair, and some want to say it was Joseph's first polygamous wife. So which was it? Lindsay.

Fanny Alger and the First Plural Marriage

Lindsay Hansen Park [00:59:53] So in 1831, her family converts to Mormonism, or 1830. There's debate on when they converted some of the earliest converts. They follow them to Kirtland, and Fanny Alger is now working in the home of Joseph Smith. And there's debate on if they're caught in the barn or not, that that's supposedly a later reminiscence. But the story goes that Joseph develops a relationship with this woman, this girl, and some claim that she's under 18 at the time. Yeah, a lot of People want to place her at 17, 18, 19, anywhere from 16 to 19, depending on what birth date you give. I think Dawn Bradley found a headstone for her that places her at about 17.

Bryan Buchanan [01:00:39] The other part of the debate is, when does this relationship even happen?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:00:42] When does it begin?

Bryan Buchanan [01:00:43] We don't even know that part for sure. Don's research is so.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:00:47] Don Bradley is the leading biographer on Fanny Alger, and he is developing new research, including the idea that she might have been pregnant from Joseph Smith. So that's kind of controversial, so I'll talk about that. But again, it's really sketchy. What we know. What we do know is a sexual relationship happened. Joseph Smith never denies that, as Richard Bushman points out, he never denies it, but he wants to. Wants to make it very clear that it was not an affair. As long as people say it's not an affair.

John Dehlin [01:01:13] Joseph.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:01:14] Joseph Smith wasn't having an affair, but he did have a sexual relationship, they'd be okay. Oliver Cowdery, of course, later says it was a dirty, nasty, filthy scrape. He's excommunicated for saying it. And Joseph is like, say it's not an affair. And so he recants that it wasn't an affair. We do know that In November of 36, Fanny Alger and her family suddenly leave Kirtland, and within a few days, she marries a man she meets, Solomon Custer. And according to Dawn Bradley, he believes she has a baby shortly after who dies. And so the theory is that she was probably pregnant and kicked out of the community, the house, who knows? There's a story that Emma found her Joseph Smith and Fanny in the barn, rolling in the hay, the term that I always love. And celestializing with the maiden, which is a later term. But, yeah, he had an affair. I think it's an affair. I think, too, a lot of apologists say that there was some ceilings done. There are some reminiscences of people that claim that Joseph claimed that there was a ceremony of some sort.

John Dehlin [01:02:22] Is that Levi Hancock? Who is that?

Bryan Buchanan [01:02:24] Mosiah Hancock.

John Dehlin [01:02:24] Mosiah Hancock.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:02:25] Okay, so it depends on what you believe. I think the pattern of Joseph Smith with ladies would suggest that regardless. I mean, Emma didn't know about it and wasn't happy about it, so that would at least break his own doctrine later on.

John Dehlin [01:02:41] I mean, this probably doesn't mean much, but if you go to, like, ancestry.com or family.com, whatever it is, and look up Joseph Smith's wives, Fanny's listed as the first plural wife. I think maybe the LDS churches position, if it has one, would be that Fanny was the first plural wife. Is that fair to say or not?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:03:02] I think that's the general idea now. And it was understood later on she gets posthumously sealed to Joseph. Later on. You have Mary Rollins Lightner saying years later that she remembers as a young girl, I think when she was 12, if I'm remembering that right, that Joseph Smith told her, I want to marry you eventually. A plural wife. This is 1834 before Fanny, and saying that he that an angel with a flaming sword had visited him and threatened him that if he didn't do this that he would be killed. He's telling this to a child, of course. And so that allegedly would have been at least a year before Fanny. So a lot of people believe that timeline. They believe The Lamanite Revelation, 1831, 1834, an angel with a flaming sword appears to Joseph. 1835, he marries Fanny. And the reason why it's so messy is because, like, he didn't know what he was doing. And it was so new and oops, sorry, Emma's heart got broken again and it was a public scandal. So that's kind of the faithful narrative, I would say.

John Dehlin [01:04:02] And there was no sealing power yet, let alone DNC132. Plus it was forbidden in the existing extant DNC at the time. So I mean. And then why is he excommunicating Oliver for just calling him out on it? So. So it's a house of chaos that would say that any of that was from God to me, it seems, I don't know.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:04:24] 1831 is the alleged first installment of the endowment. So Joseph had been promising an endowment from on high. And in Fayette, New York, it's DNC 112, 130. I'm not good at remembering the Scriptures clearly. I'm wearing a tank top. He bestows a Melchizedek priesthood. And so some people would argue that since 1831, the early endowment has been around, but you're right, the celestial sealing wouldn't happen until 1843. So many, many years later.

Bryan Buchanan [01:05:01] Couple Source thoughts on the Fanny stories the Mosiah Hancock one that you mentioned. So this later account, she's part of the Hancock family. So you can say, well, maybe he knew somebody him. He's tiny. He's not in any position to be a firsthand. So he's at best hearing things from others. And the problem with his account too is he is describing this much more formalized, structured thing that sounds way more like Nauvoo and that's the problem with memory, too, is when later things start to color your memory of things. And that's definitely going on with Mosiah Hancock. And then you mentioned Ms. Hill earlier. There are these two letters from William McClellan to Joseph Smith III later on. And the way he describes both of these things are very similar. He says Emma goes, and she sees them and is horrified. And I tell you, these things are true. The two accounts are way too similar to be two separate things. And so is there even a Ms. Hill who knows McClellan is a fascinating character because he has, by this point, mostly distanced himself from Mormonism as a whole. And so he's kind of a disinterested observer, but also kind of not. And he does seem to be at the basic level, trying to convince Joseph Smith iii. Yes, polygamy, relationships, affairs, whatever term are a part of things much earlier than you think. And they're a part of things, period, which you don't want to believe. So he's certainly got a motive. But it does seem to be somewhat more of a disinterested perspective.

John Dehlin [01:06:38] Yeah. Well, just the fact that D&C 135 or DNC 101 prohibited, it seems to just. And that Joseph was denying polygamy all the way through, it's just hard to swallow that Fanny was legitimate of God sealed, first polygamous wife to Joseph Smith. It's hard for me to swallow that,

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:07:03] especially when both debuted in 1835. Fanny and the revelation for marriage.

Bryan Buchanan [01:07:10] And even Mormons in early Utah early on don't see Fanny that way. They don't see Lucinda Pendleton that way. Yet, by and large, if you asked a Mormon in early Utah who was the first plural wife, they're going to say Louisa Beeman almost universally. So these first two, whatever sort of relationships they are, are very murky as far as a plural wife with a ceiling.

John Dehlin [01:07:37] So the next bullet is around other religions that are nearby practicing free love. We talked about that. Is that the Oneidas?

Bryan Buchanan [01:07:44] Is there anything else? Yeah, all these different communities that are taking it different ways. The. The perfectionists, later with this man named John Humphrey Noyce, who are the ones that are just a little bit after, are so fascinating because they develop this very structured way of how there's a mediator, there's a third party, you go and arrange a fellowship with them, which is essentially a sexual relationship without the happy ending, let's say, oh, wow, there's bundling, which is, you know, everyone's fully clothed and snuggling. So they're as creative as any good BYU student on how to deal with

John Dehlin [01:08:20] these poor North Star participant

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:08:23] laugh, crying.

John Dehlin [01:08:25] I know it's dark humor. It's dark humor, but they were creative back then, is what you're saying.

Bryan Buchanan [01:08:29] People are always creative.

John Dehlin [01:08:31] Okay. All right. Okay. Well, and then we've got the tarn feather incidents. That's Kirtland.

Bryan Buchanan [01:08:41] That's Kirtland. The Smith family is living in Hiram, just outside of Kirtland, to try to get away so they can. They're working on the Bible translation project at this point, and they're in the John Johnson home. And that's important because the Johnson family are very much involved in this on both sides of it. And so in the middle of the night, you know, as it gets to be late night, they drag Joseph out, they drag Sidney out. That much is. And tar and feather, both of them. And it's traumatic that everyone across the board can agree. Now, later on.

John Dehlin [01:09:12] And I'm just gonna say, every time I heard that story growing up, it's like Satan and the adversary.

Bryan Buchanan [01:09:17] There's no reason for it.

John Dehlin [01:09:19] Yeah, it's like they're trying to do anything they can to keep Joseph from proclaiming Jesus. You know, maybe there's more to it. Is that what you're saying?

Bryan Buchanan [01:09:27] So we have two accounts that later on come about. So first, 1864, Luke Johnson, who is Mirinda's sister, who is the younger teenage daughter in the household, they're all children of John Johnson, whose home Joseph Smith is living at. He says that not only do they drag them out to tar and feather them, but they bring a doctor with him to castrate him. Okay, that's an interesting wrinkle to the

John Dehlin [01:09:52] story because castration implies potentially sexual impropriety. You wouldn't do that for financial impropriety.

Bryan Buchanan [01:09:59] Certainly seems to be where he's headed with it.

John Dehlin [01:10:01] Right.

Bryan Buchanan [01:10:01] Fast forward another 20 years. You have a Disciples of Christ minister who is debating an RLDS minister. And as part of this, he brings up this story and he says, ah, well, they were going to castrate him because Joseph Smith was getting. Getting too handsy with Marinda, Luke's sister. Luke doesn't mention this, but Luke has also returned to the Brighamite tradition. He's one of the original 12 apostles. And so you could see from his perspective why he wouldn't want to mention that. But he did mention the castration idea, so it's certainly a possibility. And then this story comes to most people because Fawn Brody then includes it in no Man Knows My History. And we talked earlier about how one little thing that's wrong can cause people to throw the whole thing out. The problem here is because they say that Mirinda's brother, Eli Johnson was there helping to do this. And there's no brother, there is an uncle. So if that one little fact is wrong, do we throw the whole thing out?

John Dehlin [01:11:05] And I remember this is one of the stories Grant Palmer mentioned when he came on Mormon Stories in that essay he wrote.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:11:12] Yeah, we actually recreated this scene. I got to help recreate the scene under the Banner of Heaven. And it was such a surreal thing because we filmed it at night. And so we had the mob with torches, you know, coming for Joseph. And I got to watch them pull him out of the trundle bed over and over and over again. And it was just this intense time. And there was a lot of criticism that we included that in the show because Fawn Brody confused the uncle and the brother. But we have several sources saying that a doctor was there and we do know that he was tarred and feathered. And there were probably, in my opinion, a variety of reasons. The Mormons were gaining a lot of enemies at this point for how they were acquiring power, how they were using that power and not paying their debts. And of course, Joseph Smith's reputation with the ladies by 1832 was no secret. And so I think, was it Marinda? Maybe not. Because I think the date would have placed her at 12 years old. Could he have been, you know, inappropriate with a 12 year old? Of course, there's nothing to say that he wasn't, but. But the date is remembered wrong. I think the reminiscences have her as 16 at the time. I think regardless of the actual details, there was probably a doctor there and he was probably threatened with castration.

John Dehlin [01:12:32] Let's just put it this way, there's no less credibility with that story than with Joseph Smith's own first vision in terms of all the different accounts.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:12:40] Absolutely. The way that we look at the history, and I will say one thing about Marinda being 12, and this is. This is triggering for people, it's a discussion of sex abuse. But often castration, at least in the frontier period later on, was used most often when it was a sex crime that involved pedophilia, underage children. So there is an argument there. Now, was it a rough time and did people like to hurt each other? In a variety of ways, for a variety of reasons, of course. So who knows what happened? The interesting thing is Emma is in the household at the time. With them. And she does have two twins with her. Of course, they claim that one dies because of the draft, gets the child sick.

John Dehlin [01:13:21] Is it fair to say that it's a sketchy enough story that the church probably shouldn't use it as a faith inspiring account of the adversary and Joseph's strength and courage? Is that fair to say?

Bryan Buchanan [01:13:32] The other element that I would say, it's probably not a single reason event. But if you had to pick, the biggest likely factor for it is that this is when communal ideas and consecration ideas are heating up. And it seems to be that some of the Johnson family are afraid that Joseph is trying to defraud their father out of his house, his nice house, his farm, and they're concerned he's taking advantage of Dad. I think that's probably the most likely factor for what causes this.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:14:06] I agree with that.

Bryan Buchanan [01:14:07] But it's not a single factor. I think you can.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:14:09] And we should say that ever since that event, Sidney Rigdon maintains a major head injury that would affect him later on in very significant ways. And we see the downhill of his power as a result of this later on. And so that to me, if you're going to find sympathy for the victims, Joseph and Sidney in that, find sympathy for Sidney who was paying for the crimes of his partner, and he really pays for it.

John Dehlin [01:14:35] That's hard. All right, well, let's jump to the Missouri period and let's begin with Joseph Smith's general troubles.

Missouri Period and Plural Marriage Records

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:14:44] Yeah. So Missouri, the record for polygamy is kind of scant. We have a lot of problems going on. Of course, we have the 1838 Gallatin election problem where Mormons are trying to vote and block. They get into this riot. Mormon men are like beating the crap out of each other with Missourians. It's very bloody. Then we have the battle of Crooked river, which ends, you know, starts the extermination order, the attempt on Boggs and Hans Mill. So all of that is going on. So there's not a lot of time. Joseph is in hiding. He's running back and forth from place to place. Could he have been having, you know, relations with women? Maybe, but we don't have any documentation that I'm aware of during that time period because there is so much going on. And Joseph is. Is traveling with elders doing various projects, mostly military projects, to secure land and, you know, safety for these people.

John Dehlin [01:15:45] Okay, so not all, because I was going to say I don't really equate polygamy with Missouri very much. Anything you wanted to add to that, Brian?

Bryan Buchanan [01:15:52] There's just so much going on. He has a hard time doing much of anything in Missouri. It's such a chaotic period. The later Missouri period where he's actually living there is so short and he's arrested within months. So there's not much time to do anything. However, this is the time period where the relationship with Lucinda Pendleton is a possibility.

John Dehlin [01:16:14] Okay.

Bryan Buchanan [01:16:15] And she's such a fascinating character because her first husband is a man named William Morgan. They're married in 1819.

John Dehlin [01:16:21] Ooh, yeah, I know that guy.

Bryan Buchanan [01:16:23] So then tell us who that guy. He's a Mason and seems to grow disenchanted. And then writes this expose of masonry which promises to be explosive. And then he disappears.

John Dehlin [01:16:35] Yeah. And that started a big scandal in New England, New York. Anti Masonry. Right.

Bryan Buchanan [01:16:41] This is a big American history story much, much larger than Mormonism. And he's almost certainly whacked by Masons who are not happy with what's going on. He disappears. He's never heard from him again.

John Dehlin [01:16:51] Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [01:16:51] Differing theories on where, you know, they start to sound like Elvis stories where he appears in Canada somewhere. He's almost certainly killed. So then a few years later, she marries another man named George Washington Harris, and then they convert to Mormonism and then they end up in Far West. And so when Joseph Smith moves there with his family, they stay with the Harris's for the first couple months. And that's thought to be. If there is some sort of relationship, it's within that time period. This is perhaps even more poorly documented than the Fanny Augur stuff. There's very, very little. We get a couple hints because in Nauvoo there's this very cryptic entry where Willard Richards goes to have dinner with Joseph Agnes Kulbrith and Lucinda. Agnes has just married Joseph Smith as a plural wife, probably about two weeks before that. Willard will soon become a polygamy insider and Lucinda's there. It's hard to make a whole lot out of a dinner guest list, but it's intriguing, if nothing else. And then she is sealed to Joseph Smith as a plural wife after his death in the Nauvoo Temple. But a lot of women were sealed to him. Some that were pretty sure had a relationship with him during his life, others that were pretty sure didn't have relationship. So she's again, who knows what happened there? There's hints and that's about it.

John Dehlin [01:18:20] So if Joseph was at Far west with this couple, would the husband have known that that was going on? Would the husband have been down with it? Would it have just been A secret kind of getaway. And aren't there some comments from her that suggest some type of relationship at Far West?

Bryan Buchanan [01:18:40] Another one of those interesting hints is we have an account from a man who, who is staying at the Nauvoo Mansion, the mansion house and in the aftermath of Joseph Smith being killed, sees her apparently mourning him. Well, a lot of people were mourning him, but he paints it as though there's a little extra connection there to your comment about what did George think about this? We'll talk more about them. But when she assailed to Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo Temple, the proxy for Joseph Smith is her actual husband. That's not awkward at all. Okay, have fun with that, George.

John Dehlin [01:19:21] Okay, that's interesting. All right. Well, apparently she had a lively personality, from what I heard.

Bryan Buchanan [01:19:29] Boy, she lived a life. Todd Compton initially found some evidence that sounded like later in life she is in a convent and involved as a Civil War nurse. It looks like she probably ends up dying. A more boring, unhappy split with George in the Midwest before that. So her life was three husbands and lots of craziness.

John Dehlin [01:19:52] Okay, Lindsay, were you going to say anything about John D. Lee and Hosea Stout, or did you already mention those guys about Missouri period?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:20:01] I want to bring them up only because I think that this is important. So in the Missouri period, we have converts like John D. Lee and Hosea Stout joining the church who have a lot of rough men, who. A lot of them. I always like to say, if your ancestor worked in the Gallatin mines, he was probably a ruffian because they were involved in several wars and skirmishes with Native Americans there that were violent. And we're talking massacres where they're asked to do terrible things. John D. Lee, for example, when he is working at the mining camp, it's a rough and tumble mining camp. He has a. John D. Lee, has a horrible childhood, lots of abuse, lots of displacement. He's moving around a lot. When he makes it to the mining camp, he's driven out of town and almost murdered. Hosea Stout is similar. We have a lot of early Mormon leaders that come from this period. And the reason I bring this up is we know now a lot about trauma, ptsd, generational trauma. And these are the men that Joseph Smith put in charge. Like, these are the guys that he gave the theology to. So when we look back on it now and we're like, why is Mormon doctrine so crazy? Why is it so painful?

Bryan Buchanan [01:21:10] Why.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:21:10] Why is it so hurtful to so many people in marginalized groups? It's because he gave these. These men the ability to create doctrine and sermons. And John D. Lee and Hosea Stout are a part of that. John D. Lee, of course, is going to come up later on in the Utah period. Hosea Stout becomes powerful early on in Nauvoo. He becomes the chief of police. And Hosea Stout was known for poisoning you. In fact, we talk about this story all the time. But William Clayton, Joseph Smith's own beloved scribe, is so worried that Hosea Stout is going to poison him, and the brethren apparently think so too, that as they're leaving Nauvoo after Joseph Smith dies, William Clayton is given 30 minutes notice to join the Vanguard company because he thinks Hosea Stout is going to whack him. These are the kind of guys that Joseph Smith was aligning and converting and giving power to. And so that happens during this very violent period in Missouri.

John Dehlin [01:22:10] Okay, I should know this, but I'm rusty and I'm not seeing it on the outline. The Danites in the council of 50, do they have their origins in Missouri or more in Nauvoo? Because what I. John D. Lee was a polygamist. Right. And for those who don't know, he was scapegoated as one of the main murders in the mountain.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:22:29] And we'll talk a lot more about him.

John Dehlin [01:22:30] I was just going to say, like, it seems like some of the important insider polygamists who later get trusted and maybe even are part of the Danites and Council of 50 get recruited, like you say, into the church in the Missouri period. Is that correct?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:22:43] Yeah. So the Missouri period. Another thing we need to understand about the time period, the way that the territories worked, the areas worked in the United States, is if you didn't have a city or a government to protect you, you could form a militia. This was what a lot of people did. So militias were always forming. It was a way for you to protect yourself against indigenous raids or any sort of law and order issues. You could organize a militia. So the Mormons, wherever they went, organized their militia. There was always local militias. So the idea of the Danites, there's debate on where this comes in and where blood atonement even comes in, because we have them starting to use terms that sound like early blood atonement in the Missouri period. And it comes from the Mormons organizing militias to protect themselves. Now, there is rumors of secret police being organized early on in Missouri, certainly in Nauvoo. And it starts from some of these men who of course form informal gangs, if you will, to protect The Mormons. And. And part of it, I. I have to, you know, sympathize with the general body of Mormons at the time, because if you were at Han's Mill and you were like, hans Mill is. I don't care how anti Mormon you are, you got to give the Mormons this one. What happened there was extralegal justice gone so wrong. To murder those boys in cold blood like they did, there's no excuse for, like, never. And so you can see why there was an impulse to protect themselves. And I think that's how a lot of men justified their participation. Unfortunately, the Danites become a military organization, not to defend against outsiders, but to defend against apostates. And we see this in Winter Quarters. John D. Lee is writing in his journal that they got to warn George Miller, who's a bishop, that Hosea Stout's gonna murder him. I mean, they were all worried about people. I think the historian that passed away, he claimed that you were more likely to die of poisoning in the Nauvoo Legion than any other cause of death.

Bryan Buchanan [01:24:56] To the Danite thing, though, it's very interesting that there's this idea of them being oath boundaries, and they have these covenants of secrecy, because, of course, those are certainly not uniquely Mormon that plays into the Masonic ritual. But then, obviously, as we get to Nauvoo and we get the endowment and then we get the Council of 50 and all these things later on, Mormons will definitely incorporate elements of that, the secrecy, the covenants, the oaths that all get mushed together in other elements of their history. So that seems to be where that becomes part of the Mormon current.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:25:35] And in Missouri, you have the rhetoric, all of a sudden, God becomes vengeful. Like early Mormon God was, like, hopeful and exciting, and it was this beautiful restoration and this beautiful thing. Missouri God is vengeful and bloody. He wants vengeance. Yeah.

John Dehlin [01:25:52] Yeah. All right, well, let's jump to our favorite period, which is the Nauvoo period. And I think the first item on the menu, on the Nauvoo menu is Luisa Beban.

The Nauvoo Period Begins: Early Plural Wives

Bryan Buchanan [01:26:04] How dare you call her the first item on the menu. Louisa.

John Dehlin [01:26:08] Tongue in cheek. Sorry.

Bryan Buchanan [01:26:09] She's a very interesting woman. So her father, Alva Beeman, goes back to the early folk magic days. So he's described in many sources as this great rod. So he's involved in dowsing and this idea. And so they're.

John Dehlin [01:26:24] Which is like water divining, right? Trying to find water with the stick.

Bryan Buchanan [01:26:27] These are these very early New York converts, and they join the Church and kind of make the move progressively with the main body of the saints. The father dies, her mother dies. She's now an orphan in Nauvoo. This is another theme that will come back with these women that become involved with Joseph Smith. Her sister had married a man named Joseph Bates Noble. Usually we just went by Bates. And so after her parents die, she then moves in with the Noble family again. The only sources we have on this come from Bates later on in Nauvoo. Bates, we have to be fair, is a motivated witness because he is a believer in Joseph Smith and then Brigham Young and definitely in polygamy. So we do have to take that into account. But in his accounts, he says he marries Louisa to Joseph Smith in April of 1841, most of the time. One time he does say 1840, but the way he describes it is so fascinating because it's under a tree just a little bit outside of Nauvoo, and she is disguised in a man's clothing. And this seems to be the very first documented plural life where we have a ceremony. Joseph Smith tells his friend Bates the words to the ceremony, and then he performs it. Then also when he testifies about this later, he very specifically says there is 100% a sexual dynamic to this relationship. How do you know this, Bates? Well, I saw them. They were at my house. And so that is our very first fairly well documented plural life in Nauvoo. Unless we've talked about this before. But Don Bradley presented a fair this year about this, and he's got some new research where he says, actually the timing of this marriage is probably wrong. It was probably the next year, 1842. How significant is that? I don't know. Good question. I haven't heard Don's presentation. The way it was presented was very interesting because saying that actually, because she's not the first, Joseph Smith starts off with all these polyandrous wives instead. And that was painted as a good thing, which I would probably not agree with. But what is interesting is when they come to Nauvoo and they start colonizing the area that's now Parowan, they set up a fort like they usually did, but they originally called it Fort Louisa because, as George A. Smith said, she was the first to accept this principle. So at least that early Mormons saw her as the first plural wife. So she's a fascinating. Another element that's so interesting of her, too is that she becomes somewhat of a wing woman for Joseph Smith, approaching these potential plural wives and telling them how it was going to work, what's going to happen? So she does seem to be part of the system in Nauvoo.

John Dehlin [01:29:26] Yeah, well, I've got so many questions about that. Just because if you believe Joseph Smith or the DNC when he says God's house is a house of order, then you're like, why is Joseph practicing polygamy? I mean, at least it's after the sealing power was given, but it's still before DNC132 was written and he's still denying it the whole time. So it doesn't make sense. It doesn't seem legitimately from God, given those facts. And DNC 101 at the time is still prohibiting it, by the way. But let's just say in Joseph's mind, he felt like he was doing God's will. Do either of you have an opinion? And you'd be speculating about how pre revelation, Joseph would have sort of flipped that bit to say, all right, well, now I know the polygamy is God's will, and so it's time to take on my first plural wife. Do either of you have a way to speculate as to what might have been going on in Joseph's mind? Or was it just he was attracted to her and he was trying to find some way to justify it? Not really thinking about scripture or authority or revelation or the church. How do we make sense of it?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:30:38] I think it's a question that we discuss all the time, because again, with the history. When we're acting with just a historian brain, all we know is the documentation, and documentation is limited. You know, documentary history is sort of the orthodoxy that we all stand by, but it's problematic too. And we need to remember that, that what people write down doesn't make it true. Right. People lie in what they write down. We're missing a lot of context for what we write down. Think about your Facebook chats, if someone were to look at those, what shape of life they're going to get from who you're talking to, who you're saying, what you might tell your mom, something that you don't. You know, a different story than you tell your boyfriend or something. So it's problematic. But I think about it often and I think that there are several, several theories that you can come up with. If you take the faithful theory that he has been developing the idea of plural marriage since 1831, and he just doesn't know how to do it and he gets really messy about it and he keeps bumbling and making mistakes that's one way to look at it. My personal opinion, after knowing many prophets, seeing a lot of men with inclinations that were repressed, and, you know, in cultures where sexuality was really repressed, you have to deal with the shadow sides that live within you, and if you don't, they come out sideways. And I think for Joseph, he had a strong, strong predilection for women and for sex. I think that there. I believe the sources that say that he did. I believe the women that say that he did. I know that that's not a thing people that Mormons like to hear, they'll stop listening to what I say because of that. But I think that if we look at the evidence, there's a pattern that. And I know plenty of Mormon men, I always like to joke that, you know, any Mormon man's computer history will back up Joseph Smith's history, like a human thing that he had to deal with. I believe that really he was dealing with these urges and desires, and maybe they were getting out of control. This is complete speculation. But if you believe Sarah Pratt, which a lot of people don't, because they say she is an antagonistic source, I would be antagonistic, too. If Joseph Smith tried to get me to have an affair and then slut shame me to my whole community, that would make me mad. But she claims that Joseph Smith used to visit brothels in Nauvoo. She says she knows this because she lived next to one. And there was an unattractive girl that Joseph Smith would visit often. There was also a steamboat, a madam that worked at the steamboats which Joseph Smith frequented. Her name was Mrs. White, and she said she was very familiar with Joseph Smith. He came in all the time. And so it's possible that that was getting out of control. And he didn't want to be seen as a man that couldn't control him himself or his vices. He saw what happened with his father who couldn't control himself, and so he found a way to. Like I've seen many prophets find ways to institute their shadow sides into doctrine. We. We see some of the most gross, corrupt fundamentalist groups today with the most disgusting practices, taking their urges, their repressed urges that they should be working out with a therapist and turning it into doctrine. And Joseph Smith starts in Nauvoo with Abrahamic sacrifices. And this backs up the Beaman theory with Don Bradley. If he starts with polyandry as his gateway, that makes sense, because it doesn't start as him saying, oh, I'm going to take the wives of My husbands. He starts off Abrahamic, testing everyone around him, including John Taylor and Heber Kimball. John Taylor, it says. He goes and says, I want your wife, Lenora. God has commanded me to take her. And Lenora is like, I think like 10 years older than John Taylor. She's older than him, 16 years older, and he's crazy about her. She hates this idea. She gets so upset. They have an argument. She cuts her finger off after breaking some glass. She says she loses her finger over it. And then she gives birth to a baby, that she blames its death on this, the stress of this incident. John Taylor finally tells Joseph Smith, you can have my wife, Lenora. And Joseph Smith says, just kidding. God just wanted to see where you stood. He again does this to Heber Kimball, as we know, presents it as a biblical Abrahamic sacrifice. And he says, I want your wife. They agonize about it, which I can't imagine what that would do to a marriage. And as we know from early Heber, and they loved each other. They were like. They would like kiss their notes, their letters. And so that was hard for them. And they settle on giving their 14 year old daughter to Joseph. So I think he was.

Bryan Buchanan [01:35:25] How old was she?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:35:27] Just shy of 15.

Bryan Buchanan [01:35:29] A few months shy of 15. Thank you. Thank you.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:35:31] I hate that so much. The games we played for, like the obvious reasons, you know, and I've done them too. Like, Joseph Smith had a pattern and I would be so much more trusting and affirming of Mormonism and its history if we could just be like this guy. This was his thing. This was the thing about Joseph. He liked women and he was trying to figure out a way to acquire more women that I could understand. That's a very human thing. That's something we see around us, but instead we try to put all this purity trappings around it, and that's where it gets really twisted and dark, I think.

John Dehlin [01:36:08] Mm. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, maybe it was cognitive dissonance management and he imposed some prophetic imaginations onto his sexual desires.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:36:26] I think that the history, from my perspective, backs that up. I also think there's a faithful reading that he was developing the theology and it was a hard sacrifice to do. I don't believe that. I actually think it's irresponsible and cowardly to believe that. But I understand why people want to believe that.

John Dehlin [01:36:44] The reluctantly obedient Joseph Smith.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:36:46] Yeah. I mean, again, if that is true and if God is commanding you and you feel so strongly and so torn about it and you're gonna tell all your buddies, tell your wife, you know, like, tell your wife. That's the thing. Like, it wouldn't matter to me if Joseph Smith had all these girlfriends if he were honest about it. You know, like, if people were consenting, then that's like his business. But that's not what this was. And so for us to go back and like, you know, reapply these prophetic. I don't know, motives. Motives to it, it's bad news.

John Dehlin [01:37:21] Well, also, he's denying it the whole time. That's a problem. And it was scripturally forbidden the whole time.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:37:26] He's denying it to some people, not to all people.

John Dehlin [01:37:28] That's right. That's right.

Bryan Buchanan [01:37:30] Yeah, he's denying it publicly, that's for sure. And that's. Again, this recent spike in denying Joseph Smith's involvement with it points to these public denials alone. And that's not good history. And also just doesn't mesh with how reality works. If you only believe public statements from anyone, you're going to get yourself in trouble real fast, because that's not how the world works. And I wanted to go back to the idea of the Bible thing for a minute, too, because if you are a society that believes very strongly in the Bible, and that's something, as modern observers, we have to remember is how much that culture was steeped in the Bible just permeated absolutely everything, for better and worse. And so if you read a Bible who talks about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, all of whom are polygamists, and that's not a bad thing, then as a believer in the Bible, you have to think, well, then that should be okay now. And that was part of the Mormon defense of that all throughout Utah. This is a biblical doctrine. Why are you yelling at us for believing in the Bible more than you do? That was usually how the arguments took shape. But once that door is opened that polygamy is a possibility and is on the table, then as normal sexual drive becomes part of that equation, that is so easy for that to get out of control. And we can see that in the Kirtland period when they were doing the ecstatic gifts and it got way more than anyone wanted to really deal with.

John Dehlin [01:39:05] Meaning speaking of tongues.

Bryan Buchanan [01:39:07] And then all of a sudden we're jumping off stumps and jumping off cliffs

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:39:11] and playing Indian where they all. They recreated the Book of Mormon and they were like pretending to scalp each other and all kinds of stuff.

Bryan Buchanan [01:39:19] Yeah, yeah. It got weird and then it got racist. And it got weird.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:39:25] It got racist and then it Got weird and then it got racist.

John Dehlin [01:39:27] Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [01:39:29] So, yeah. So once you have this mixture of a belief in the Bible plus sexual drive, that's an equation for all bets are off the table.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:39:39] And I would say this is. I'm trying to throw a bone to faithful believers because I actually want to be respectful. I believe in pluralism. I was a believer too. I understand this feeling. However, I want you to know, and I've seen it firsthand, and I feel very, very strongly about this. I've sat in rooms with 8 year olds who have been molested by church leaders in fundamentalist communities that use these same arguments that you are using to defend Joseph Smith. If you use these arguments to defend Joseph Smith and his behavior. Oh, he was just experimenting with the doctrine. Oh, it was new. He didn't know, he was reluctant. Oh, he had to keep it secret.

John Dehlin [01:40:20] An angel made him do it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:40:21] An angel. All of those then, ergo, apply to Warren Jeffs. They apply to Samuel Schaefer and the Knights of the Crystal Blade, the guy that locked the little girls up in barrels. This is what you are empowering. And I'm sorry that that doesn't sound pretty. But when we make defenses for these guys, we have whole groups, thousands of people today that use these arguments to justify their behavior. And of course they would because they're following the prophet.

John Dehlin [01:40:51] Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [01:40:53] Another thought on that is we see this a little better in Utah. When this polygamy becomes the cultural norm is if, if polygamy is required for exaltation, then where is the line between what looks like the beginnings of an affair and the beginnings of a righteous plural marriage? That line doesn't exist. And so for a woman, the first wife or the second wife or whatever, who watches this scripturally, doctrinally, she is being told that this is not only good, but required. And so that has to be so hard to have to wrestle with. Wait a minute. I don't like this. My gut says no. The scripture says yes, that's a terrible position to be put into and will make their lives extremely unpleasant because of that.

Power, Control, and the Dynamics of Polygamy

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:41:52] And I want to say another thing about this because we're talking about the whys and the hows. Ultimately, this is my, like, drum that I like to beat a lot, which is polygamy is about power. It's not about sex. Joseph Smith, of course, you know, clearly liked to have sex with a variety of people. But polygamy, the institution as it's applied in Mormonism specifically, is about power. And we need to start talking about it as that because that is exactly what it was when Joseph Smith was practicing it. He was organizing power. The women he was choosing had value politically to him, spiritually to him, and socially to him. He was choosing women that had power. He was choosing women whose husbands had power, whose brothers had power. It was a system of power that used women, and sex was a byproduct of that. But polygamy is absolutely about power, and it still is.

John Dehlin [01:42:53] Yeah. Beautiful. That was really powerful. Really powerful. Segment going back to how you introduced Nauvoo a little bit, you mentioned polyandry. You know, I'll never forget the time my friend Paul Mayfield at Microsoft said, it's not the polygamy that. That got me out of the church, it's the polyandry. And I'm like, what? What is that? You know, so it's. It's. It's Joseph Smith marrying allegedly women as polygamous wives who already married other men. And the theory is, is that are the pull of the polyandrous wives clustered towards his earlier marriages. Is that generally what you guys just said? I just want to make sure I

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:43:38] understand that when you say clustered, you mean towards people that he knew.

John Dehlin [01:43:42] His earliest polygamous marriages, chronologically clustered were. Yeah. His earliest Nauvoo polygamous marriages were polyandrous in that they were women already married. Is that right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:43:54] Most of them are. I mean, the. The bulk of his marriages happen from 1841 to 1843. This is where most of them happen.

Bryan Buchanan [01:44:02] They do. More of them happen toward the beginning.

John Dehlin [01:44:04] Okay, okay. That's the problem.

Bryan Buchanan [01:44:06] That is we don't always know the dates. And so as the Louisa Beaman case and yeah, a lot of these questions would only be really well answered if we had better data.

John Dehlin [01:44:19] And so, I mean, a fair question is why, if that was a strategy, if they were clustered and if they were clustered for a reason, is it possible, what, is that some way where, if there's a child, it can always just be attributed to the existing husband? Like, do y' all have thoughts on that?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:44:37] Well, we can talk about the progeny question if you want to talk about that.

John Dehlin [01:44:40] Sure.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:44:41] So everyone wants to know about Joseph Smith's kids. There are several, Several theories. First of all, DNA scientist Ugo Perego has done some work on this. You can read his research in the. Remind me the series Persistence of polygamy. Persistence of polygamy. He's done work there. At the time, he couldn't find any documentation of the progeny being Joseph Smith's. But as DNA research develops, so do our techniques. And so there are some new techniques that have not been used on the progeny. So that is one door that is still not completely shut on if there are descendants of Joseph Smith. The theory that I. That I go with is that Joseph Smith was well practiced at having relationships outside of his marriage. He wasn't a dummy. And I always say we treat women of the 19th century like they're idiots, like they didn't know how to take care of their body. People knew about these things. Unwanted pregnancies were a huge burden in society at this point. They could mean life or death, and so people knew what to do with them. Abortion has always existed, and we know that it existed in Nauvoo, and we know that midwives, many of them, like Patty Sessions, knew how to administer abortions. John C. Bennett, Joseph Smith's close associate at the time, was known for giving abortions or sending women to get abortions. So this idea that people didn't know how to take care of their own contraception at this time is ridiculous. People did. And I don't think that women wanted to have children with the prophet at this time. It would have meant a lot of problems for them. Scandal, scandal. It would have also ruined relationships. There were a lot of reasons not to have children. And I would also say Joseph Smith didn't have a good fertility track record. A lot of his children died. His, you know, his first set of twins died. They didn't make it. His first son died, but they lost a lot of babies. He wasn't known for being very fertile. So I think that that's also another

John Dehlin [01:46:55] case because apologists want to say, oh, he and Emma had so many, I don't know, babies or fetuses. But, I mean, there were. Emma did have a lot of pregnancies, and so they want to. Apologists want to make it sound like he was very fertile. But you're saying the opposite.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:47:09] Yeah, I mean, there was a theory I heard long ago that Joseph Smith had syphilis. And if he had syphilis, you would. You could impregnate someone, but the child wouldn't live. I don't know. I feel like we would have known more about that. You know, given all the women he was with, maybe that would have turned up. But again, that was a scandalous thing. I think the biggest case for this is Joseph probably didn't want progeny to show up at this point. We do know that progeny was happening with some of his associates. William Clayton has a baby pretty early on, so it's not unheard of. But it makes sense to me that the women would have been very careful about this and to treat them as if they were some dumb yokels that didn't know how to do that. They would have known and they would have had resources if Joseph didn't want them to.

John Dehlin [01:48:00] And not to be too graphic, but whether it's pull out method, rhythm method abortions, there's lots of.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:48:07] They had condoms at that time too. You could use several things like the lining of a sheep's stomach. You know, there were lots of ways that people dealt with these issues. And of course they weren't perfect. Like they're not perfect now. And again, the DNA issue, in spite of what people say, is not closed. We have tested with the means that we had at the time, which I believe was using the alleles of the father. I can't remember. It's been a while since I've read this stuff, but we're learning new developments every day, so it still could be a possibility.

Bryan Buchanan [01:48:42] And even with the associates, who were a few of them that had children, there was chatter about how this was something they didn't really want. And again, in a Victorian era, we're not going to see as much discussion about any of these issues as historians want to have. And so there are a lot of these that, that they probably were talking about. They just weren't writing it down. And so we would have a better idea of how they were addressing this if we had those other records.

John Dehlin [01:49:11] Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:49:12] I also think it's interesting that several women believed that their own children were descendants of Joseph Smith. So that, you know, shows that the time timing was questionable for the women themselves.

Joseph Smith's Polyandrous Marriages

John Dehlin [01:49:24] Okay. And so let's tie this down to the polyandry discussion because I think that's what led us into this question. If the, if the polyandrust marriages tended to be clustered early, is it safe to say that's an indication that maybe that was Joseph's cover, that he would just have sex with other men's wives? Or is that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:49:47] Yeah, I think that's a viable theory because it plays into this idea of Abrahamic sacrifice. He's testing the waters with these Abrahamic sacrifices. But if we look to other structures of groups that are organizing like this, living similar living situations. You have David Koresh, right, In Waco, Texas, later on, who starts his own compound. He goes to his closest male associates and asks for their wives. It is a symbol of power. It's loyalty. This is something that you see in primate behavior where, where it's this idea of taking power by taking the mate of, you know, another powerful person. And so I think, to me, it was not just convenience and cover. I think this was about loyalty. Joseph now was traumatized by Missouri. I think it's very clear if you read his writings, this is a man suffering from a lot of fear and paranoia, which is only going to escalate and amplify in Nauvoo. And I think that he wanted to know who was on his side. His biggest enemies were once his friends. And so what better way to get their loyalty than to, you know, tie their family so closely to you?

John Dehlin [01:51:03] Interesting.

Bryan Buchanan [01:51:04] And it worked. And it worked. But look at those stories. John Taylor, Heber Kimball. You have no bigger loyalists and defenders of him, then and later than those

John Dehlin [01:51:14] two or the polyandry.

Bryan Buchanan [01:51:16] Those are both.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:51:18] They were given the Abrahamics test.

Bryan Buchanan [01:51:20] Yeah. In neither case does he marry Vilate or Lenora, but the offer was there in both cases, so.

John Dehlin [01:51:29] Yeah, because many of the polyandrus husbands were faithful. Correct. Even some of them knew and some

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:51:37] of them stood as proxy to ceilings.

John Dehlin [01:51:40] Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [01:51:41] It is interesting that sometimes they will be painted later as not being faithful. And that's why Joseph Smith married them, these women, is because their husbands were out of order. That's not the case.

John Dehlin [01:51:52] No. Okay. Okay. Really quickly, and I don't know if this is relevant or not, but I thought you guys might be interested if nothing else. Apparently when Don Bradley gave his presentation at the Fair Mormon Conference, the Scripture plus person did a TikTok where she's basically saying, hey, oh, you're smiling. Why don't you tell the story, Brian? Let Brian handle this because our Julia, or analyzing Mormonism, did some analysis. But go ahead and say what you're gonna say.

Bryan Buchanan [01:52:19] That was such an interesting. And again, it would be more helpful if we'd seen Don's presentation. But the way that it was presented, you know, the summary of it that was given in that TikTok was fascinating because it was trying to use polyandry as this faith affirming element of naval era polygamy, which I thought was fascinating. And that is an impulse that I would not have had. But yeah, that was a very interesting way to package his presentation, I thought.

John Dehlin [01:52:52] And do me a favor to explain what y' all remember the argument to be, because I want to give Julia's historical response once, if you remember.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:53:01] Well, she starts out with the idea that Louisa Beeman's marriage might not be the first. And isn't it exciting because that means that his polyandrous marriages were the first. Right. So ergo, it's this beautiful gift from God because he's building this like, network of family. What else?

John Dehlin [01:53:21] And also about the sex. It's like. And maybe then that means since we don't have a lot of evidence of sexual polyandry, that maybe it means polygamy wasn't your. Lizzie, you're already sorry.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:53:32] The sex argument. Okay, I'm sorry. I want to hear Julia's defense. I do. I just have to go on a spiel about this. Like Mormons, we're so obsessed with sex. It's like our repression just seeps out everywhere in the doctor and like we, we want Joseph Smith to have a TK smoothie. We don't want him to, to have sex at all. We don't want to think about sex. And yet all of our theology is about building internal increase. Look, in the Book of Mormon, how many times we talk about seed. It's everywhere.

John Dehlin [01:54:02] And that's code word for sperm, right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:54:04] Yes. And everything is coded. It's so Victorian. Still to this day, everything, even the things about not having sex are about sex. And most of Mormonism now is about not having sex, which is about sex. We are sex obsessed. And so when we're talking about these ideas, it just drives me crazy when people are like, did Joseph Smith have sex with his 14 year old wife? Did he have sex with his polyandrous wife? Does it matter? Because to me, it's about power and control, which is what assault and rape and coercion is about. Power and control. Whether he touched someone below the belt doesn't change the fact that he altered the course of their life. He took ownership of them, of their spirituality and their eternal life. And so this idea where we're like, did he or didn't he? It doesn't matter. The doctrine says he's going to eventually if he doesn't now.

John Dehlin [01:55:02] And so you're saying it's awful with or without sex?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:55:05] It's awful with or without sex, the sexual sex. To me, it's hard because as a survivor myself, when you talk to survivors, when you call assault sex, it's tricky and it's confusing for survivors. And I'm sorry, but I don't know of any of the marriages of Joseph Smith that doesn't have an element of coercion that we have documented. So call it what you want, but it's not like this happy romantic meeting, maybe Louisa Beeman, maybe. I mean, we don't have her voice to tell us, but to say that did they or didn't they have sex? It was still about power and control. It was still about power and control. And it just makes me so mad that, you know, Mormons, faithful Mormons, will argue, well, if he had sex, then it was bad. No, that's not what makes it bad. It's the power and the coercion and the lying that makes it. That makes it bad. If it were sex between consenting adults, then it's great. Like, then less. That's. It's not our business, but that's not what this is. Go ahead, Bryce.

John Dehlin [01:56:10] It's also super problematic. It makes no sense to say, well, Joseph didn't have sex with his polygamous wives. Well, we know that Brigham Young, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, learns us. No, Joseph F. Smith, Heberger Jordan Smith, and all the other polygamists from Joseph to the end of polygamy were having sex with all their wives. Why would we want to give Joseph a pass and. And say he didn't have sex? Plus, the Book of Mormon, was Penny Alger.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:56:34] Was she in an affair? Either way, he was having sex with her like Joseph Smith was having sex with the women. Which women? We don't know. We know that Brigham Young didn't have sex with all of his plural wives, but again, that tries to turn it into something it wasn't. Polygamy is not about sex. It's about power. Sex is the male perspective of what is happening. You know what I mean? And Mormons become so obsessed with it because we. It's. Do they or don't they? Black or white? Did he touch her or did he touch her? He took ownership and control over her in a way that affects eternities. And if you don't see something wrong

John Dehlin [01:57:13] with that, with or without the sex,

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:57:15] with or without the sex, then, like, I don't know what to tell you.

John Dehlin [01:57:19] You're missing the more important stuff.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:57:21] It's. Yeah. And again, I know modern polygamy, there are definitely men that use this to fulfill sexual desires, but I have met men who have been brought into this since birth and believe it. And it is a struggle for them. It is not about the sex. It's about the obedience to them, because this is about power. And it doesn't mean that. I don't know. I'm sorry to keep going off on this, but Mormons are so sex obsessed with it shows up everywhere. And arguing if he, you know, slept with his polyandrous wives, I think really is a dangerous idea. And it impacts survivors today who have to deal with the fact that they are being molested and then confessing to their bishops and their bishops are framing it as sex, like Mormons. Coercive sex is not sex, it's just not. And coercive marriages I think fit into those categories.

John Dehlin [01:58:18] Are you saying it's rape?

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:58:20] I don't know because I wasn't there. But I will say that I think it's wrong. I think a course of marriage, a marriage with a penalty, a threat and penalty, is wrong. And I'll say that I think Mormon monogamous marriages still fit under that. If you're marrying someone because you're afraid that if you don't, you're going to go to hell, that's not okay and we should be upset about that.

Bryan Buchanan [01:58:46] And it is important to note that all of the relationships didn't look the same either. And there were some that do look like Eliza Snow's seems to be one where she was pretty enamored with him. And then there's others that that element doesn't really seem to be there. And there's talk of angels with flaming swords and ultimatums and 24 hour windows and things like that. And so like all relationships, a lot of them looked very different. Another thing that I think is so interesting, the impulse to take the sexual dynamic out of it is so odd because both the Book of Mormon, the Jacob passage and then the revelation that becomes section 132 explicitly authorize increase. So to argue that that wasn't a thing is weird because that's not the scriptural text telling you that, that's you telling yourself that.

John Dehlin [01:59:38] And both the Book of Mormon passage and The D&C 132 passage make it about sex. It's about seed, it's about posterity. That's the whole point of polygamy, is to create a righteous posterity.

Bryan Buchanan [01:59:51] So arguing that that was not even in Joseph Smith's mind, what was he doing is weird because clearly it was.

Lindsay Hansen Park [01:59:58] And it's not like he wasn't inventive creatively with the we know he was doing adoptive sealings. Let me give you a story. It's going to sound like a sidetrack, but I promise it's relevant. I met a modern day prophet, Robert Ray Black, who's now passed away. One of his plural wives he acquired according to him, when she was 17 in Mexico. She's a Lebaran and she has a genetic disorder that is similar to down syndrome. I forget the name. He tells me that he took her as a plural wife to rescue her because when he met her, she was living in a shack. She was living no better than a dog. And he talks about this nice, you know, thing that he did to save her by marrying her as a plural wife. He has four, I think, four kids with her. Her name's Rebecca. She's a lovely woman. I think it's a horrific story. If he wanted to take care of her, why did he have to marry her? If she were living like a dog, couldn't he just get her some services, get her some support, bring her up here? Why did it have to be marriage? Why is that the way that he had to help?

John Dehlin [02:01:01] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:01:02] That, to me, answers this question. If Joseph Smith wanted to be connected to these people and just have this beautiful family, why couldn't he seal himself as sisters in the gospel? Why did they have to be wives?

John Dehlin [02:01:14] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:01:14] Because it's about power.

John Dehlin [02:01:16] Yeah. Yeah. Because that's. The other canard is the early Mormon apologetic that there were just so many women lying around and too few men and too many women. So the women have had to be married off in polygamous ways to men to take care of them. But that's a great point. Why was the only way to take care of them to have them be

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:01:35] married, and once they're married, they're under a temple covenant that they have to obey their husbands. And that's how we get into the history of the endowment. So don't tell me it's not about power, because it absolutely is about power and control. And we're all afraid to say it, but rape is about power and control. And like Brian said, and I want to be careful about this, there are nuances. Not every situation was the same. Did Joseph Smith have sex with Helen Marr? I don't know. But what I do know is that Helen Marr, for years, for years, and she was faithful, complained that her autonomy was taken away. She was depressed. She couldn't go to dances with her friends. She couldn't flirt with boys she liked. That part of herself was robbed. And whether she spent two minutes in the bedroom with some adult man doesn't.

John Dehlin [02:02:24] Two minutes.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:02:26] Seriously, though, give women some credit. We can endure a lot of stuff, but the thing that changes it is the power, not the situation. It's the person that's using you and manipulating you. And that's what happened to Helen Marr, whether she slept with him or not. And I'm not trying to discount people's experiences with sex being transformative or sex being really degrading and traumatic, because. Of course. But What I'm saying is, in this context, this is about power, and we need to look at it. So when we try to argue whether he had or didn't have sex with Helen Marr, I say it doesn't matter. He took her life away. And for years, Helen Marr struggled with deep, deep depression and deep resentment of polygamy until the day she died.

John Dehlin [02:03:10] Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [02:03:11] Well, and also this idea that it was this excess of righteous women, and I would argue that. That a lot of the teenagers in Nauvoo who were friends with these women and who wanted to develop normal relationships with them and that were pushed away, that said, nope, you can't do that, would probably be thinking, I don't think those ratios sound right.

John Dehlin [02:03:31] Yeah. Well, this is beautiful. Julia's just messaging me how much she's loving this conversation. And just to clean up a couple quick things. Julia who? I'm just. She's. She's applying for a master's degree in history, and she's wanting to follow your footsteps, Lindsay, in terms of being a mom and a historian. Juanita Brooks as well. I'm cheering Julia on, but she writes, heber C. Kimball and William Clayton were authorized to be in polygamy during Joseph Smith's life and had kids with their polygamous wives during Joseph's lifetime. So that's important, right? I mean, I think it's good.

Bryan Buchanan [02:04:13] Absolutely. Yeah. But even in Clayton's case, there's a case where Joseph Smith says, let's keep it quiet. Let's maybe not attempt to have a ton of babies, but if something happens, we can figure it out. And Kimball's is probably the first polygamous child in Nauvoo. And that's actually our best clue of when the marriage took place, is knowing when the baby was born.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:04:36] Yeah, of course, I wouldn't. I don't know unless Julie has research to, like, contradict this. But I don't think it's authorized necessarily, because Clayton's was kind of an oopsie. And Hebert Kimball comes towards the end in Winter Quarters when it becomes this. This known secret. So maybe if there is an authorization, maybe. Did he authorize it.

Bryan Buchanan [02:04:55] That, you know, Clayton's pretty clear. I think he does. And Kimball. I think we can infer. I don't. I don't think they were. They were doing it on their own.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:02] I think Clayton, after shooting Pregnant though, he's buddy.

Bryan Buchanan [02:05:06] I mean, even earlier, there's the case of the woman in. In England that he had known, and he says, if you want her, I'LL pay for her to come here. So he's. He's clearly pushing him towards it, I think.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:18] Oh, I know. But not having a baby.

John Dehlin [02:05:20] Oh.

Bryan Buchanan [02:05:20] Oh. As far as authorizing a baby.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:23] He authorized the marriages, of course. I thought you said he was authorizing the babies. And I was like, no, that was kind of.

Bryan Buchanan [02:05:29] No.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:30] What he intended.

Bryan Buchanan [02:05:30] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:31] Does that make sense?

John Dehlin [02:05:32] We're out here.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:33] Sorry.

John Dehlin [02:05:33] Julia's writing Sarah Peake Moon and Margaret Moon. I don't know what she.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:05:37] Yeah, those are William Clayton's wives.

John Dehlin [02:05:39] Yeah. We are officially gearing out.

Bryan Buchanan [02:05:42] And Margaret is Clayton's.

John Dehlin [02:05:45] The other point I wanted to make that Julia wrote, going all the way back to this question about who was it the first polygamous wife in Nauvoo? Beeman.

Bryan Buchanan [02:05:53] Was it Louisa Beeman?

John Dehlin [02:05:55] She writes, don seems to be basing his changing date to the fact that Noble's house isn't finished being built until 1842. But then Julia writes, they weren't married in his house. They were married outside under the tree.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:06:11] Under a tree, Julia.

Bryan Buchanan [02:06:16] And then that's the thing is how our memories work is we will frequently tie it to something. Problem is that that isn't always right. Our memories get conclude and we invent the thing that we've tied it to. That turns out that actually wasn't the case at all. And we see that over and over with all of our later affidavits about the Nauvoo experiences is they're remembering things. But you can see the same person will remember the same thing differently in different accounts. So we again have to weigh them all together.

John Dehlin [02:06:46] We'll check out NL analyzing Mormonism, Tick Tock and. And Instagram, because Julie does great work and I'd love to call her out. So anyway, beautiful. Okay, so you just made a reference to this, but what in the world does the. Oh, oh, I thought, okay, the next thing is masonry connection. So what in the world does masonry and potentially the temple ceremony, if we're not getting ahead of ourselves, have to do with polygamy?

Masonry, the Endowment, and Temple Ritual

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:07:15] Do you care if I do endowment? And then you take on masonry. Okay, so allegedly 1831 is where Joseph restores the first part of endowment, giving the Melchizedek priesthood in Nauvoo. He starts developing a ceremony before the Nauvoo temple is built. First in the red brick store. He gives the endowment to, I believe, nine men. And of course, it's not quite the endowment that we know now. And then he adds a washing and anointing element to it. Two months after he does that, he's admitted into a Masonic Lodge, and it's a year after that. Correct me if my math.

Bryan Buchanan [02:07:52] Other way around. Masonry comes first.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:07:53] Masonry, two months. Thank you. This is what Brian's for two months before he is inducted into the Masonic Lodge. And then he develops this. And then a year later, he gives the celestial sealing, and women are allowed into the endowment. And so it is indisputable that Masonry is connected with this, because prior to this, when you see his earlier attempts at the endowment in the Kirtland era, has none of this. Has none of this stuff. It resembles more Protestant churches. If you've been to the Kirtland Temple, it looks like a regular Protestant chapel in a lot of ways. And it's not until Masonry is introduced, which we see in Nauvoo for a variety of reasons, because it has a lot to do with power, that the temple endowment starts to really replicate the Masonic service.

Bryan Buchanan [02:08:44] And those connections are explicit. In Nauvoo, we have correspondence that. Where I believe it's Kimball writing to Pratt saying that Masonry is this degraded form of the true endowment. And essentially the endowment is true, undefiled Masonry and polygamy starts to ramp up at the same time. One of the most interesting connections is in Brigham Young's journal, which is generally very boring and crappy. He has these two entries on the same page, and they're in a Masonic cipher. And the top one says, I was admitted to the Nalaj today. And then the second one is this very cryptic entry where J. Smith either saw or was Agnes. And from later accounts, Brigham Young is the one that performs the ceremony, sealing Agnes Coolbrith, his brother's widow to Joseph. And so the thought is that this is some sort of acronym for wedded and sealed or Sealed and wedded. But there's all these links. And then obviously, we have Lucinda that we mentioned earlier, who had been married to William Morgan, who writes the first explosive expose of the Masonic ritual. And then the thought is that Relief Society sort of looks like a female lodge that's a companion to the Masonic Lodge, which is only man. So there are all these links at the same time period. And of course, the men that are part of this first group that do the endowment ceremony, all of them are Masons.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:10:17] Well, in these first two months, there's a lot of excitement. The Mormons start joining in Mass. The Masons, the local Masons start to be bothered by this. It starts to be a conflict. And in my opinion, and I'm always hesitant to talk of Masonry because Nick Letersky and Cheryl Bruno are the experts on this, and they've written a new book that is very dense and everyone should read because it has everything you need to know. But basically, the Masons get threatened by the Mormon presence. Joseph is already co opting it, thinking, like, maybe this is the way the.

Bryan Buchanan [02:10:47] This is.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:10:48] You know, this is ancient, I'm ancient. It pairs really well together. And so pretty soon after that, you see Joseph saying, oh, it's corrupted, but we're going to take it and make it our own. The Masons wore fabric garments that had markings on them. This is where we see the garments start to be developed. And of course, the women are sewing the garment but not allowed to wear them. And that's where we get the polygamous sealing coming in, which says, okay, women can be sealed, but in your covenant, you have to covenant unto your husband. And this is where they really codify this idea of polygamy and power, saying, okay, we're gonna let women into this endowment, but only if you're sealed unto your husbands and only if you're righteous unto your husbands. Which is really convenient with what is going on with Joseph's life on the outside. He's having problems with Emma Smith being compliant. She's promised the ceiling as sort of a favor. Joseph Smith gives a lot of favors, gifts for people who start complying to polygamy. And the endowment pairs really well with this.

John Dehlin [02:11:53] Okay, so the idea, and I'm a little obtuse or thick, but the idea is that Joseph's like, trying to figure out how to formalize, at least in secret, the practice and some sort of Masonic secret, making promises, keeping the promises, making people give oaths and even death oaths. There's great synergies there in the spirit of bricolage, to, like, find to use. To use what he learned from Masonry to create a secret society with penalties that could help keep polygamy secret, but also to spread its practice.

Bryan Buchanan [02:12:33] Is that right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:12:34] So it's sort of. So in Kirtland, the temple ceremony was they had veils that they would drop. They had levels, but it wasn't at all next to the ceremony that we have now. Right. And so when they're in Nauvoo, it's an economic enterprise building this temple. They're having contracts, they are bringing in a lot of immigrants and giving them jobs to work on the temple. So Joseph Smith has to have something for the temple. They develop baptisms for the dead. Right. That's one thing that they start doing pretty early on. And the endowment comes in with the Holy Order of these nine men. It's a secret society, basically, which, of course, we think, you know, within the two months of Masonry, he's like, oh, I can do this, and I can do this better. So he has this holy order of men, and not all of them are polygamous. One of them is William Law, who goes on to do the Mormon Expositor. He never takes on plural wives. So you can't necessarily, necessarily say he's trading the endowment for polygamy, but you can say he's trying to establish a secret society. I'm going to use that word. That's not the word Mormons use. It's the anointed Quorum. He starts letting more and more people in. But, of course, by the time, you know, Brigham Young leaves Nauvoo, they have 5,000 people who have been given this endowment. So it definitely extends beyond polygamy. But Joseph sees, I think, the benefit of. In giving such things as eternal life and eternal promise and second anointings and all of these extra, extra things to people who are the most loyal to him. And all of the men in the Holy Order are men that he is interacting with. For example, William Law or some of the other men have contracts on the temple. There are business relationships with some of these men. And so there are reasons why they're getting initiated into this Holy Order that I would say that are beyond just spiritual.

John Dehlin [02:14:27] Okay, fascinating.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:14:30] Did I get anything wrong?

John Dehlin [02:14:31] Okay. All right. Brilliant.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:14:33] Masonry makes me nervous. There's so much on that.

John Dehlin [02:14:36] Yeah, well, that's fascinating. All right, well, the next bullet is collecting more women. So is that. Do we kind of COVID that, or is that.

The Acceleration of Plural Marriages in the 1840s

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:14:44] I'll just say this. So 1841, I don't have my notes, but I think it's like six women, four to six women. He's married in 1841. 1842, it gets into the teens. 1843, it's like 21.

John Dehlin [02:14:57] And was that without totally unbeknownst to Emma, or did he float it and, you know, her non compliance was there non compliance prior to what predated the DNC132 revelation?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:15:12] Well, clearly Emma knew about other women because Joseph had been arrested and, you know, accused of her battle friend and Fanny Augur and all of these other instances she would have known about. So it's not like she didn't know that, you know, this stuff was going on. I mean, Nauvoo, though, in Nauvoo. Nauvoo gets interesting because in 1842, is a crazy time for Mormonism. This is where we have John C. Bennett come in. And he is a bit of a charlatan, but he's a bit of a genius, too. A lot of people don't know that. He. He was an inventor. He bred a certain kind of chicken. Do you remember the kind of chicken?

Bryan Buchanan [02:15:49] Rock Island Hen.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:15:50] Rock Island Hen, I think seems like the name he invented. Ketchup. Modern ketchup. That's John C. Bennett. He was selling ketchup pills as a medicinal thing. He claimed some military experience, although it was dubious. But he did have power and connection, and he helped build the Nauvoo charter and the Nauvoo Militia. And he was a very good ally for Joseph Smith acquiring power. He also was a bit of a, I would say, sexual deviant in the sense that he would have sex with a lot of people of all ages and all genders. And all genders, yeah. He was accused of homosexuality. And I don't want to include that as deviant because I don't think that that's deviant. But I would say underage girls. I think that counts. But yeah, he even accused Joseph Myth of engaging in homosexuality with him as well. So John C. Bennett is power hungry. He becomes. What were all of his positions?

Bryan Buchanan [02:16:48] Everything. He's mayor, he's in the Nauvoo legion. He's.

John Dehlin [02:16:52] Was he co president of the church at one point? Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:16:55] So he gets all of these things and he's doing spiritual wifery his term, and he's starting to tell more people about it. And Joseph Smith does not want people to know about this. John C. Bennett is being a little too free and the rumors are getting out. So he gets in Trouble. And in 1842, he's excommunicated. Around this time is Joseph Smith is trying to help Brigham Young. I love this story and hate this story. I love this story because it's embarrassing to Brigham Young. I hate this story because it's such a terrible story. Martha Brotherton is a young lady that moves to Nauvoo and Joseph and Heber and Brigham spend several days, I would say, grooming her, asking, you know, Joseph will take her on a walk and say, hey, do you think I'm the prophet and anything I say is true. And she's like, of course. Yes, of course. And then eventually they lock her in a room. Now, John C. Bennett hears rumors, and there's rumors that circulate around Nauvoo that a woman has been locked in a room for days by the prophet and of course, Martha doesn't claim she was locked in a room for days, just hours, but apparently they go in and out, trying to coerce her into polygamy. They tell her that it's of God and she needs to do it. And then Brigham Young even demands a kiss before he lets her out of the room, which is so disgusting to me. She leaves, goes and sells her story to John C. Bennett, who publishes it in an expose a few months later. So all of this happens in 1842. It's kind of chaos. And at the same time, you know, you have. He's acquiring all of these women, and some of them are Emma's own friends. And so this is where we get the anointed quorum. We get women that he's starting to associate with, like Eliza R. Snow, who are close to Emma Smith, and Emma doesn't know. And in fact, when Emma finally does know, which I'll have Brian talk about, she still. I think she still never knew the scope of it, as a lot of people didn't at the time. She believed that his first plural wives were the Partridge sisters, who were two sisters who lived in the underage sisters who lived in the home. Were they underage? Let's see. One of them.

Bryan Buchanan [02:19:02] They're a little bit.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:19:03] One was 19. One was. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:19:06] Weren't they foster. Foster kids.

Bryan Buchanan [02:19:07] Those were the Lawrences, The Lawrence girls. Well, I guess the Partridges. Edward had died, so the father.

John Dehlin [02:19:12] So many women, it's hard to keep them all straight.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:19:14] Yeah. So. But we were talking, so I'm going to give another theory. This is controversial, and I hesitate even saying this because it's going to bring some hate, and rightly so. It's just a theory. I was thinking about. I was rereading William Law's interview that he did later on with the newspaper years later, and they were talking about if Emma knew and what Emma was like. And they said, did Emma know? And he said, of course she knew. And he said to the reporter, you've got Emma all wrong. And what he said was, because Emma later denies. Because Emma denies polygamy. And of course, when people say, why would Emma deny polygamy? Any woman who's had a broken heart knows, like, it's embarrassing. It's shameful. You want to deny it. You don't want to relive that, like, of course. But William Law gives a different take, which I think is compelling, which is that Emma was kind of in on it. She, you know, all these women, and we can talk about this, you know, you can trace some of the women get granted indeeded property. Joseph Smith claims the property, so does Emma Smith when he marries these foster girls. And these women like the Partridge sisters, whose father was wealthy and the Bishop and had all these holdings. Joseph Smith gets a lot of property in return and so does Emma Smith. And Emma Smith never pays that money back. She, according to William Law, she, she knew it and she benefited it. She didn't like it, he said, but she knew that it meant some financial profit for her. And I think about that when you think of leaders like the. What's that guy married to Sheila in Oregon?

Bryan Buchanan [02:20:52] The Bhagwan.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:20:53] The Bhagwan, they have these women that are attached to them who are benefiting with the soft power. It's possible Emma was like that. So I don't, I don't like to paint Emma as this, like, poor Victorian victim all the time. I do have sympathy to that girl back in 1828, going to her neighbor crying and saying, what have I done? You know, because she's trapped. But I think as it went along, she probably knew more than she let on. I mean, she knew that Joseph Smith had a habit of taking women in their house and she continued to allow women to work in her house. I'm not saying that to blame her. I'm just saying that she probably had some willful, you know, ignorance about it. She probably didn't know how to deal with it. And so she took advantage of the power she had. And I think that that's a tough situation. I still think she's a victim of Joseph Smith. I don't think she's responsible for him, but according to William Law, she profited from it.

Bryan Buchanan [02:21:51] The case of the Lawrences is fascinating because Joseph Smith is their legal guardian and there is an inheritance. The number that William Law throws out turns out to probably be too high, but it's still good sized. And what happens is then, you know, as a legal guardian, there are rules for how he has to care for their estate. And the inheritance gets part of the steamboat, the Maid of Iowa, it becomes part of the times and seasons. And there's all these things. And on the one side you have Gordon Manson writing about it and saying it was all conducted above board. On the other hand, we have Johnny Stevenson writing about it, says, actually no, it was fairly shady. And so that's a case where there could have been some financial shenanigans going on.

Emma Smith's Experience and Resistance

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:22:34] And I think it's tricky because you do. We do know that it broke Emma's heart. I Mean, there are stories of bodyguards standing outside her room when the revelation is presented to her that she's crying and screaming, going back and forth. Flora Woodworth, who was one of Joe's ex underage brides, she was the one he spent a lot of time with. William Clayton spends a lot of time in his journal talking about Joseph Smith spending time with Flora Woodworth, who was she 15 at the time?

Bryan Buchanan [02:22:59] I believe she's fairly young too.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:23:01] Yeah, she was like 5 or 6 when they met. And Joseph was like 37 when he married her and she was 15. I think that's the famous story of him giving a watch to Flora that Emma says is my watch and has a fight with him. So I think it's complicated. You can look at Emma as someone who is sort of in on it, or you can look at Emma as a victim. And I think it's a lot more complicated. If you look at modern stuff, there's the story of Warren Jeffs with one of his favorite wives named Naomi, who he'd known since his childhood friend. And Naomi was there for some of his Warren Jeffs most horrific ordinances, we'll say abusive moments. She coerced women into things. She benefited. She got to go to Disneyland with him in Las Vegas and do all these things. And you'll talk to members who are up close and personal with both of them, and they have a lot of sympathy for Naomi. They think that even though she did horrible things, she was a scribe, she was also trapped. So I think Emma was probably in a similar situation as a woman in that society. She didn't have power outside of her husband. And I think she tried to find power where she could.

John Dehlin [02:24:12] Yeah. Another example modern is Keith Ranieri and the NXIVM cult. And he absolutely used women to recruit sex partners. You know, I mean, that's a lot of.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:24:23] You'll look at a lot of cult leaders that have a woman as their, like, number one. That's why I brought up the. I can never remember.

John Dehlin [02:24:29] Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:24:30] Yes, yes.

John Dehlin [02:24:31] Wild, wild country. It's a great wild, wild country.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:24:34] Thank you. So many cults to remember.

John Dehlin [02:24:37] And I think that they're polygamous sex cults, you mean.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:24:41] This is my frustration with Eliza Snow later on. I think she, you know, we venerate her, especially in the Mormon feminist tradition. Like, what an articulate, wonderful poetess. She drives me crazy. She did so much damage to women. She used her position to gain power for herself while stomping on other women to do it. And I think that that's what happens in a patriarchal system.

John Dehlin [02:25:03] Yeah. What do we make. When Grant Palmer did that episode I referred to previously, he talked about sort of a theory that when Emma was. When Joseph was trying to get Emma to acquiesce and to allow him to practice polygamy, that Emma said, all right, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I want William Law if you're going to have Jane Law and a bunch of other women. And so it implies that Emma was potentially open to multiple sexual partners herself. And then the text of DC132 almost seems to make an indirect nod to that potential discussion between Joseph and Emma about Emma taking someone else. But then it gets shut down. You're nodding your head, Brian.

Bryan Buchanan [02:25:50] That is such a cryptic verse in that. And, you know, let my servant Emma not partake of the thing that I offered her. What the world is that could be that William Law's a possibility. Chris Smith has suggested William Clayton as a possibility.

John Dehlin [02:26:04] Of what?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:26:06] Instead of it being Jane Law, it

Bryan Buchanan [02:26:07] was William Clayton that she wanted instead of William Law.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:26:09] They spent a lot of time together, Emma and Clayton.

John Dehlin [02:26:12] Okay.

Bryan Buchanan [02:26:13] I don't think it's something you could reject out of hand. We don't have any good evidence for it, but we don't have any good evidence against it either.

John Dehlin [02:26:19] Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:26:20] As a person who has been born with this innate sense of fairness and life is not fair, which is very difficult, but I can understand being like, no, you get that. I get this. I don't think that's what she wanted. I wouldn't say. I wouldn't frame it as. And people do frame it as like she wanted it, too. I think she wanted a husband that was, like, loving and respectful, and she didn't get that. It's tricky because the William Law thing is disputed. I like the Clayton theory, too. I mean, we spent time searching Clayton's journals. Emma and William were. Spent a lot of time together. Joseph was always pawning William off on Emma. I think. I hope for her sake she found happiness. If you look at the historical record with her relationships, it doesn't seem like she did. She seemed to choose men and accept men in her life that did step out on her. Her second husband, you know, had a baby out of wedlock, and Emma raised it. And to me, it's kind of a tragedy. But it also feels complicated and almost gross for me to speculate on her character, because I do have an affection for her, and I do see her as a victim of Joseph Smith, because Mormonism was hers too. She sacrificed and lost everything for it, and she helped him build it. And the Smith family and Emma saw Mormonism as theirs. And when Joseph Smith dies, she loses it, for better or for worse. And I don't think that that was fair.

John Dehlin [02:27:50] Yeah, well, that was powerful stuff. Really quickly going back to John C. Bennett, when apologists want to say that John C. Bennett was doing that awful spiritual wifery. But what Joseph did, that's such a weird justification. And since they were co presidents and both mayors and clearly in cahoots until the falling out, I don't know how anyone with a straight face can sort of, you know, John C. Bennett, spiritual wifery, bad. Joseph Smith, polygamy, good. That just is laughable to me.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:28:24] We had this great panel at Sunstone that Chris Smith organized a few years ago called the Prophets Puzzle, where they had four panelists. Don Bradley, Dan Vogel, Chris Smith and.

Bryan Buchanan [02:28:37] And Taves.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:28:38] And Taves. Am I getting all four?

Bryan Buchanan [02:28:40] I think that was the four.

John Dehlin [02:28:41] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:28:42] They all had to argue a different position. Was he a fraud? Was he a con man? And so Don Bradley, of course, argues that he's, you know, sincere prophet. Chris Smith argues that he's a fraud. And so they all had to take these arguments. And Chris makes this great argument that I keep remembering. He says he goes through all of Joseph Smith's associates, including John C. Bennett, including some of these guys who are forgers and inventing firebombs and all kinds of crazy stuff. And he says, you know, people will say that poor Joseph Smith, he was always just taking in the wrong people and they would just trick him and he didn't know. And Chris says, I say he knew exactly who he took in as his friends. He chose them on purpose. And I think that that case with John C. Bennett, I think John C. Bennett got out of control and matched Joseph Smith power for power. But when we talk about spiritual wifery, tell them about the Boston situation.

Bryan Buchanan [02:29:33] Yeah, at the right, towards the end of Joseph Smith's life, the Boston guys really get out of hand. So you've got, at the core, you have our naughty Triumvirate Williams Smash Brothers.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:29:47] We've got William Smith, Joseph's little brother.

Bryan Buchanan [02:29:49] You got George Adams and Sam Brannan, who are very. These are naughty boys set of characters and they're doing the John C. Bennett program there. And so just like with Bennett, the question is, how much did they get from Joseph Smith? What percentage is things they saw Joseph Smith do? Heard Joseph Smith say, how much is just them adding onto it that's the question that's difficult to answer. It's undeniable, but that some of it is coming from Joseph Smith.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:30:20] So these four men were running a branch in Boston, Massachusetts. They're practicing spiritual wifery, getting in trouble. Joseph T. Ball was said to be mixed race. There's some debate on if he was black, if he was white, if he was mixed race, who knows? We don't know. But we do know that they were practicing spiritual wifery. Woodruff finds out about it on a. He goes and writes a report or something goes on the machine.

Bryan Buchanan [02:30:45] He's sent to go take care of it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:30:46] He's sent to take care of it. He's scandalized because it's making the papers and it's causing a lot of problems. And so all the boys are sent back to Nauvoo and sent to work on the temple to kind of be quiet. But William Smith, Joseph's own brother, he was another associate that Joseph couldn't control. He kept getting into trouble with the ladies with the alcohol, punching Joseph Smith in the temple. Like, these guys were rough and tumble guys.

Bryan Buchanan [02:31:12] Bennett is back to. Bennett for a minute, is such a fascinating character. And it is really hard to nail down how much of an insider he was. Because Brian Hills points out, if you look at meetings there, tons of meetings are happening and he's never there. So there's that part of it.

John Dehlin [02:31:30] He's off selling the charter to Governor Ford. Right.

Bryan Buchanan [02:31:32] But then he writes his book, and it's clear that he does know a lot of things. And one of the fascinating elements of his life.

John Dehlin [02:31:40] How did he get a book out in 1842? Like, that's the same year he's excommunicated.

Bryan Buchanan [02:31:44] Well, he's writing articles. So there's a series of articles that he does that form the basis of it. And then he goes and he does a speaking tour and where he's workshopping some of the elements of the book, too. But in the book, he names names, sort of, because he'll give us the first letter of the woman's name that's thought to be wife, and then asterisks for the remaining letters of it. And he clearly knows because he's naming probably Louisa Beeman, probably Agnes Coolbreath, but then there's a couple that are a little mysterious. We're not exactly sure who he's talking about. So he's a mixed bag. He's clearly there for some. He's clearly not there for some. And then his book, he just adds a whole bunch of Craziness.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:32:23] And of course, he did no wrong in his book. Like, it was like, oh, oh, no,

Bryan Buchanan [02:32:26] no, no, no, no, no. And because he is like, his biographer calls him this saintly scoundrel. He's just this big enigma.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:32:33] But he did invent ketchup. And we do eat fry sauce. So we're all.

Bryan Buchanan [02:32:38] The guy that writes the biography comes to it as a food historian for his promotion of tomatoes. And all of a sudden he discovers this Mormon part of his life and is like, oh, didn't know about that part.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:32:53] Every time you eat fry sauce, you're complicit in the system, people.

Bryan Buchanan [02:32:57] It's the John C. Bennett program.

John Dehlin [02:32:59] I love it. All right, well, did we talk about secret codes and language?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:33:08] I just want to point this out, as you can tell, with Brian. This is Brian's geek moment. He knows secret codes in journals. Just tell him a little bit about it.

Bryan Buchanan [02:33:17] We did our presentation at Sunstone this year about this stuff. So there are some very better examples. The Brigham Young, the Masonic cipher. That's a little better. William Clayton will do things like reversing his initials or reversing an E for Emma, or calling polygamy the P or

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:33:35] John D. Leaf, the council. 50 spells T I, F, T Y or something.

Bryan Buchanan [02:33:40] He just spells 50 backwards. And no one will ever figure that one out. So, yeah, and that's a theme that we talk about frequently is Mormons really suck at secrets. And that's when people come to us with these stories that we've never heard of before and we say, I'm not buying it. Somebody would have talked about it. They could not keep that juicy secret. They didn't have a good vault.

John Dehlin [02:34:03] Yeah, well, we're kind of sometimes liars that don't believe in lying. And so we're just bad at it. You know what I mean? But we do it. We learned a lie early, but we just suck it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:34:14] I think Mormonism has just co opted our definitions for things. We tell you that happiness is defined as a, B and C. And we tell you that honesty and integrity is a, B and C. And that's why we break a lot of laws.

John Dehlin [02:34:27] Okay, well, so we've got here the endowment and other favors. Is that in addition to what we've covered so far?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:34:36] I think we've covered it. I would just say that Joseph Smith had favors. Favors becomes the code word for wives. He would give favors, favors to men who were loyal to him. He would promise them favors, meaning wives. So this happens several times in the documents.

John Dehlin [02:34:54] I think we talked about this when I interviewed you for your polygamy. But there's this whole. Again, just like with John C. Bennett, it's like, Joseph Smith good, Warren Jeff's bad. But as soon as we get in this sort of area of, like, giving women away and there's no document, I think in the history of US History, there's probably worse, but where it's just more clear that women are considered to be chattel than DNC132. Because it's just like. And I will be. You'll be given here, and women will be given to their husbands and virgins will be given. Like, it's just women are chattel. Right. But as soon as we start talking about Joseph Smith giving favors, I'm just starting to get Warren Jess vibes, you know, like, do you have thoughts about that?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:35:37] I mean, the story that I always tell is I was at a Mormon History association panel on the new Council 50 book, and I had just gotten back from Short Creek and had a pretty, pretty rough time hearing some terrible stories about Warren Jeffs. And they were talking in the Council of 50 how they, the early church leaders were planning to overthrow the government and become the government and take over the world and break laws. And someone asked how you can justify that. And the historians who were faithful were trying really, really hard to justify, well, they were under siege, and they felt like they were going to lose their families, and they felt like they were going to lose their property and they were going to war, and it was a hard time. And so this is why they felt like they had to break the law. And I just remember sitting there thinking, this is how Warren Jeffs justifies everything. They feel like their families are under siege. They feel like they're going to lose their property. The government's closing in on them. Is that the justification? And I remember raising my hand and a very prominent historian, I won't say who, she rolls her eyes at me when I say, how do you think, you know, fundamentalists are hearing these justifications? And this historian said, oh, that's different. And I was like, it is not different. It is not different. And it's not this idea of, you know, taking history out of context or whatever. There were laws in 1842, in 1843 and 1844, there were morality clauses. This is why it was a secret. If it was okay, Joseph Smith wouldn't have to publish all these denouncements about it. So to act like times were different then and so the rules were different about following the law. Opposite, they had Laws, they had justice. Why do you think the government was closing in on them? Oh, because they had the truth. No, it's because they were voting in block. It's because they were forging. They were forging so much in Nauvoo, Joseph Smith's own guys, they had the bank collapse like they were running things that were getting them into trouble. Does that justify breaking the law? Does that justify taking these women? And you talk about women as chattel. I would say women are the keys to men in heaven. I mean, in Mormon theology, men get to be gods. Like, that's such a dangerous idea to give human men. Like, I can't think of a more dangerous idea. Right. I never got that. I get to be like a. Like a side piece to a God. I get to be like a heavenly mother if I'm really good.

John Dehlin [02:38:14] Well, a goddess.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:38:16] A goddess, but one of many. The Eve of this planet. You know what I mean? And so when you think about that, in the temple itself, the endowment, and I know that they have updated it, but the endowment, as developed, the ceiling, as developed at the time, was a ceiling of compliance to the women, to this. That's what it was. It is there in the text. You are complying to your husband. You're under his power. And. Yeah. I mean, what is more dismissive of someone's autonomy than that?

John Dehlin [02:38:51] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:38:52] Do you want to say anything to that?

John Dehlin [02:38:54] And is it fair? That was Joseph Smith. Like, you get this woman. Oh, who's a woman? Okay, wait, I get to decide. Okay, you did a good thing for me. You get Susie. Like, was he doing that kind of assignment?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:39:07] Tell him about the moons, the moon sisters.

Bryan Buchanan [02:39:10] William Clayton. Clayton has. William Clayton has his eye on this woman. And problem is, Joseph Smith also does. And he tells him that I've had a revelation that only two of a family can be married to one man.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:39:24] And this changes, by the way. But all of a sudden, the Lord tells him right then. And two. It's only two.

Bryan Buchanan [02:39:30] So, yeah, and there would be. He would run cover sometimes if. And so we mentioned this earlier, but there will be these contemporaries of these women who are trying to have a normal relationship with them that get shut down and told explicitly. Nope, sorry, you got to go elsewhere. I don't care if you're in love with her, you're out of luck.

Spiritual Wifery, Dissenters, and the Nauvoo Expositor

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:39:56] The problem with spiritual wifery, it wasn't authorized by Joseph Smith. That's it. Do you know that the guy that wrote all of your hymns and your hymnals, William Wines Phelps, was excommunicated Four times. Because he liked to have unauthorized wives. I mean, so many of these guys, it was so messy. And then you have the story of, okay, John D. Lee and Brigham Young. This is the story in Nauvoo. This is Nauvoo era. This is how messy it is. John D. Lee falls in love with two sisters. Emmaline Free and her sister, who he married. I'm blinking on her name.

Bryan Buchanan [02:40:35] Louisa.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:40:35] Louisa. Thank you. Gosh, Juanita Brooks would be so mad right now. Louisa and Emmeline. He falls in love with both of them. Emmeline is very pretty. Brigham Young says, oh, no, no, no. Emmeline's gonna be for me. He has, you know, a revelation, whatever. So they split. He marries Emmeline, and John D. Lee marries Louisa. John D. Lee gets called into a High Council trial. So you want to tell me that times are different then, and we had a different standard? Let me tell you this story. John Deeley gets called in front of the High Council for, quote, this is the exact word, frigging his wives. Too many times he's bragging about it. He frigging Louisa free at least 21 times in a night. The neighbors and families and wives are so upset and concerned, they go and tattle on him. John D. Lee says, I'm sorry. I got the spirit of the devil in me. I couldn't stop. Do you know, like, we laugh about that. That is abuse. The women didn't go brag to the High Council and say, I had the best night ever. They said they. This horrible thing happened. He has to have a High Council where he's reprimanded. That's what John D. Lee does with his wife. Brigham Young, he makes Emmaline his favorite for years, has 10 kids with her. She gets addicted to opium and then dies unhappy when he replaces her with another favorite wife. Like, that was the story of those two sisters. So this idea that women are being traded as favors, it's unauthorized. We don't know who happening all the time. And I think the William Clayton is an example of Joseph Smith authorizing it. But Brigham Young was clearly doing it, too. And they get in trouble later on because Joseph is like, no, no, no. I have to be in charge of this. But he can't control these men. The secret's out now, and it's getting really messy. If you look at the missions to England, the early Nauvoo missions to England, the Brethren are getting into trouble with the ladies. Any missionary that's ever messed up on your mission with a girl, do not feel Bad because Parley P. Pratt did it first. I promise you.

John Dehlin [02:42:37] Mic drop, soda drop, soda drop. I investigated my own grandparents and great grandparents practice of polygamy. It turns out my grandmother Karma was the daughter of a third wife. And I knew her, but I. I didn't know this, but the fourth wife of my great grandpa got addicted to opium and she was abandoned and she had to move to Oregon and died broken. But that story has happened a lot.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:43:09] Yeah, I mean opium, that's a whole frontier like trope, I think, because opium,

John Dehlin [02:43:13] it was called something else

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:43:16] I can never say was given as medicine. They gave it that and lobelia, which would make you just puke for days. But yeah, a lot of people got addicted to it and especially women. It was considered a nervous disorder. So if you got anxious, and if I were a plural wife to Brigham Young, I'd be real anxious. That's what they gave. And there are several stories where Brigham tells Emmaline to go dry out, you know, and get clean. And she just can't.

John Dehlin [02:43:43] Yeah. All right, well, I think, I think it's time for DNC 132. Is that yours, Brian?

Bryan Buchanan [02:43:51] And that's our best written source outside William Clinton's journals for Nauvoo polygamy, because it lays out all the rationale that was in his head and that we hate to give air to it, but this is another one where denying Joseph Smith's involvement with it. Every argument you can think of to argue that this is not legitimate and it's actually better documented than really any other revelation we have, because you have William Clayton writing in his journal this AM received a revelation of 10 pages on the order of marriage. Then we have a copy of it. Well, it's not the original. We don't have originals of any of Joseph Smith's revelations. So it's legitimate. There's absolutely no reason to deny it. We have later Brighamite followers who will swear affidavits that they were there at the High Council when Hyrum Smith read it. You'll also have members of the High Council who, who didn't love it, who then in the Nauvoo expositor will talk about it and will quote essentially from it. So we have no reason to doubt it's authentic. But it is interesting because we also have the later story of why it's done is to try to pacify Emma.

John Dehlin [02:44:58] Yeah. 22 wives into Joseph's practice. Right.

Bryan Buchanan [02:45:01] Read the room, guys. This is not going to pacify Emma. This is going to make her mad.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:45:05] I don't think it was to pass. I think it was to gain her

John Dehlin [02:45:08] compliance, to punish her for some reason.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:45:11] Why else would there be threats in there? And they're very, very distinct threats. I mean, she will die, be destroyed. You'll be destroyed. And I want to point out that that language was used since Missouri, and it was often used against the enemies who they would actually kill. So it meant that not God would come down or angel with a flaming sword, but maybe Hosea Stout would show up by prophecy and do the work.

John Dehlin [02:45:36] So she could have feared for her life.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:45:38] Absolutely, she could have feared for her life. The idea of being destroyed at that point was so tangible to them. And however they understood it, whether they believed it was God's doing or not, it was a reality. People were getting destroyed. William Lott, you know, thinks he was. He goes on to say that he thought the Danites tried to kill him a few times. And we know from John D. Lee's Winter Quarters diaries that the Brethren weren't above it. They were sending guys to kill their own people. So whether Emma took that Governor Boggs

John Dehlin [02:46:11] and Porter Rockwell allegation.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:46:14] Right, of course. You know Porter Rockwell, the attempted assassination of Governor Boggs. Yeah, I mean, many, many examples of this during that time. So whether Emma took that as a literal threat to her life, if or not, we don't know, but we know that it worked. And she. They got her compliance

John Dehlin [02:46:35] super dark. And I'll just give a shout out to Radio Free Mormon. He came on Mormon stories recently and showed the parallels between DNC132 and the Navajo Expositor and other minutes that were being kept. I think he killed any possible, you know, a desire to believe that Joseph Smith didn't practice polygamy or did. Or was it the author of DNC132?

Bryan Buchanan [02:46:59] I think he's a nice idea. It do. It won't.

John Dehlin [02:47:02] I think.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:47:02] Yeah, I know. We were really excited when he came up with that because I hadn't heard that argument and seen the side by side. I think. I think that that does argue because people will say there's no contemporary evidence that Joseph Smith believed in polygamy. I think that argument that compares the two, the DNC and the Expositor is pretty compelling for a contemporary document.

John Dehlin [02:47:22] And when William Law is in the First Presidency and he's the one coming up with the Nauvoo Expositor, that's as contemporary as it gets.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:47:28] Well, and it's not just him. You've got Chauncey Higbee, who was excommunicated for some spiritual wife shenanigans himself. It's not like these guys were pure and clean. They were involved in it. It just didn't go the way they wanted.

John Dehlin [02:47:40] Yeah. Well, that takes us to William Law, Sidney Rigby, and other dissenters like Rigdon. And I'm guessing Nancy Rigdon's a part of this as well.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:47:49] Yeah. So I just wanted to bring that up because Sidney Rigdon, I didn't pay a lot of attention to. He never was really interesting to me for a long time until we started our podcast. And then hearing the history, how invested he was, he believed in such an optimistic view of Mormonism. A lot of the beautiful doctrines I think Sidney Rigdon helped develop. And after, of course, he's tarred and feathered. He has his head injury. It's said after that he would revelate with Joseph Smith. It might be a psychedelic. I like that theory. I think it's interesting. But that they would lay him and Joseph would lay in a room and they would revelate and be like, can you see the heavens? Yeah, I can see the heavens. You know, Sidney starts getting headaches. He starts getting sicker. He starts having more episodes. And by this point in Nauvoo, he's losing power, but he still has the prestige. Everyone still saw it as his church. So Joseph has a problem. He has a problem that he has to convince Sidney to either get on board with this new direction of Mormonism or, you know, discredit him. And, of course, when he approaches Sidney's daughter, she says, no, no, thanks, Nancy. She goes and tells her father, and he, of course, he's like, ah, shucks, Joseph. No, he couldn't do that. And he tries to talk him out of it and keep it quiet and defend Joseph. And Nancy is insistent. And I actually love her defense because you have to imagine the power dynamics of her in this room. She's this young girl, her father, her whole world is there saying, this didn't happen. Right? This didn't happen. And she said, yes, it did. And I'm not backing down. The courage that must have taken is pretty remarkable. And I don't think she gets enough credit for it. But. But what happens is that Sidney's whole family pays for it. Nancy. Rumors get spread all over town. She is slut shamed completely. Sidney starts to lose. I think he was working the mail contract at the time. They give it to Emma Smith. Sidney, they start saying horrible things about Sidney. And this is probably why Sidney doesn't get any power after Joseph Smith's death during the succession crisis. Because Joseph runs a very successful smear campaign against Sidney with William Law and the exposure folks. We know how that goes. They're people that were loyal to Joseph, for better or worse, become disenfranchised. With the way Mormonism is going, there were a lot of reasons. Polygamy was one of them. They published the Nauvoo Expositor. But Joseph is acquiring so many enemies at this point. Most of them had been former friends and insiders. And so the evidence is mounting. And I think at this point, Joseph. Joseph knew it. And this is why he, you know, organizes an escape attempt, which he eventually comes back. But I think it's because he. The writing was on the wall. He'd gone too far when he started going for the. Not just. This is the sad part. It wasn't enough to go after the wives and the daughters of his friends. It was when he came after their money and their businesses that it really got serious. Do you want to say anything about the dissenters, the old Higbee brothers and their shenanigans?

Bryan Buchanan [02:51:01] Yeah, there's so many that the Fosters, they had been in these positions and they just. Yeah, they.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:51:12] No, the Fosters were mad because they were in land speculation with Joseph Smith. They were signers in the Expositor. I mean. I mean, it's messy. Like, these guys weren't perfect. But I really resent when people say, like, oh, you can't believe William Law because he was a dissenter of the Church. Can you not believe anyone that's left the FLDS and written an expose about the flds? Like, again, it's just.

John Dehlin [02:51:35] So who's more credible than someone who was there and objected to it and left because of the problems they saw

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:51:41] and the documents and facts have exonerated, you know. Yeah.

John Dehlin [02:51:46] The novel Expositor is not. Has been validated, substantiated. Right.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:51:51] Almost all of the allegations there. And again, you know, RFM's great work in comparing it to. DNC backs it up, too. So, yeah, again, we tie ourselves in knots trying to make Joseph a good guy over and over and over. And that's, to me, the tragedy of modern Mormonism is why not just let people see him as he was? We would all be better off for it. Doesn't mean you don't get Mormonism. It just means you have a more ethical Mormonism. But instead, we really need him to be perfect and humans aren't perfect. And I think that's. It's just. It's cancerous to argue that he was Perfect.

John Dehlin [02:52:30] Yeah. We're trying to argue that Joseph was perfect. And then these heroes like Nancy Rigdon and William Law were demeaning and defeated, devaluing them as apostates and as malcontents, when they are. Don't you think William Law acted heroically and is up there with Nancy Rigdon in terms of heroics?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:52:50] I think there were a lot of dissenters that said no, probably some that we'll never even hear of. And I think that that's, again, the tragedy of Mormonism is that we choose the wrong side of the Book of Mormon. We always, as Mormons, we take the wrong side, we take the wrong morals from things. And that's because we have been for, from the very beginning, to take the actions of these men and instead of calling them what they were trying to make them godly, so our God becomes sort of inverted and upside down. And I think that's why you have today fundamentalists who are perfectly fine breaking the law. That's why you have, you know, our hidden trust funds and all of these things, because we think that we're above the law, because we have an inverted sense of morality. And it stems from polygamy.

John Dehlin [02:53:40] Yeah.

Bryan Buchanan [02:53:41] It's interesting to see how polygamy creates divided loyalties within families. So you have one of the members of the High Council who ends up being part of the Nauvoo Expositor. His daughter marries Joseph Smith as a plural wife. And then you have some of the Ivins family who are the bad guys, but then you also have some of the Ivans that come to Utah and are the leaders for the next several generations. So polygamy is at the heart of a lot of the wider divides, but also just on the basic level, the family divides that start to occur at this point.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:54:15] It's my friend El Ray from Community of Christ that said the Book of Mormon thing. Sorry, I can't remember so many names. El Ray.

Joseph Smith's Death and Its Aftermath

John Dehlin [02:54:22] Well, I think this takes us to maybe the final point that we'll cover today in this part one, and then hopefully I can convince you guys to come back for part two or part three as needed. But the martyrdom like this was always a real sore point for me. I was always sold that Joseph Smith died like a lamb to the slaughter, innocent, like a pure white lambie sheep. And I don't think that's a fair characterization of how he died. So. So how did he die and did it have anything to do with polygamy or not?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:54:58] So by this point in 1844, Joseph Smith had gotten into so much trouble. He had tried to run for president. I think that was a fatal mistake because it brought national attention. He sent emissaries to Washington, D.C. to try to vie for power. He had some compelling arguments, you know, for abolition and some interesting ideas with Texas, we'll say. And. And he was very sure of himself. But what he was doing was making local enemies because he was trying to get men in his presidency power, local power. So the nearby town of Warsaw, Illinois, really starts to acquire a lot of enemies. It becomes known as the anti Mormon town. In fact, there are stories later of Mormon women that are laundresses for people in Warsaw and like, being shunned by their Mormon neighbors for going that there. The men in Warsaw start publishing in their newspaper problems of the Mormons acquiring power and, you know, their election fraud, their money fraud, the allegations against Joseph Smith and women. And so it comes to a head where the governor gets involved. And now we already had the governor in Missouri who issues this extermination order. Now they have the governor of Illinois, and he's like, I don't know what to do. He doesn't know how to handle this. And so he.

John Dehlin [02:56:17] Ford, right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:56:18] Governor Thomas Ford. He starts writing letters back and forth to Joseph Smith. They start negotiating. He even writes to Emma Smith. And he's trying to say, listen, why don't you guys just get out of town? I don't know what to do, but why don't you guys just leave? It's getting to be too much. Joseph says, okay, maybe. But then Joseph gives this speech where it's militarized. Isn't Was it Sidney Rigdon that says all the warlike stuff that gets everyone stirred up? I can't remember.

Bryan Buchanan [02:56:46] This is like salt sermon in Missouri.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:56:48] Salt sermon. Oh, I'm thinking Missouri. Joseph Smith gives the alleged last charge where he was like, hey, we gotta. You know, the government's gonna come against us and we're gonna go to war. So now all the local militias are stirred up. So Joseph hears word of this. He's gonna escape. Emma and his other friends convince him to come back, and he does, and he is arrested and taken to Carthage. And this is where Emma starts hosting Governor Ford. I think she hosts Governor Ford in her own house. She feeds him and his men. And Governor Ford is trying to, in earnest, negotiate some sort of justice with Joseph Smith. But he does warn them that extralegal justice might be. A lot of people are mad, and that's what happens. Do you want me to keep going or do you want to?

Bryan Buchanan [02:57:39] There's all these things that they're mad about. But politics is at least close to the top of the list. And because they can see that the Mormons are quickly growing to have the balance of power within their own county, Hancock County. But then they're also starting to have more of an effect on state races for senate, for the Congress and so, and business interests and their militia. And the militia, the Nauvoo Legion, is very scary. It's huge. The Masons aren't happy that this Masonic lodge in Nauvoo is the biggest lodge basically in the country. And so there's all these reasons that people see this growing creeping power in their neighborhood, not unlike what happens in Oregon in wild, wild country. As things grow, people start to get. Get a little nervous.

John Dehlin [02:58:24] And as I remember, nobody knows my history. Joseph was playing this game where he would promise that the Saints would vote with one party, but then like, he would vote with one party and then tell the Saints to vote for another. And a lot of the state Illinois politicians were feeling betrayed by Joseph Smith's promises where he would go back and forth. Am I getting that right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:58:45] He was also trying to place his own men in the state legislature. And a lot of it did have to do with this militia. So they were acquiring a lot of weapons and they were running a lot of drills, military drills. They were. There was a. A lot of people don't know. There was a young boys militia that Joseph Smith III was in where they'd make the boys march. And you know, it was. It was getting very warlike. Even Emma Smith was like, are we sure we want to do this? This is very militarized.

John Dehlin [02:59:14] Wouldn't the legion march to other towns as like a show of force, if I remember right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:59:19] I don't know about that. I know that they would march through Nauvoo and it would be a big deal. Joseph, at this point, the power was so consolidated to him. He was mayor, he was a prophet. He was anointed king and priest of the world. He was wearing his military uniform with his gold epaulettes and his saber everywhere he was going.

John Dehlin [02:59:40] He's judged too, right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:59:42] He was judged. He ran the town council. He was running for president. I mean, there was all kinds of.

John Dehlin [02:59:49] And prophet. Can't forget that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:59:50] Who was the chancellor? He wasn't chancellor. It was.

Bryan Buchanan [02:59:53] He had been of the University of Nauvoo, but that was more or less non existent.

Lindsay Hansen Park [02:59:57] He was the chancellor of the Nauvoo University. So the power was consolidated. So of course the neighbors were Upset because it was affecting their funding, it was affecting their militia. And Joseph Smith, you know, was making threats. There were still conflicts between some of his secret police going into these other towns, accusations of things happening. And so he's arrested.

John Dehlin [03:00:20] And we forgot being crowned king of the world. I think we forgot that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:00:25] Yeah. Secret, secret. Anointing king of all the world. So.

John Dehlin [03:00:30] And did we mention the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor printing press?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:00:33] Oh, no. Go for it. Do it.

John Dehlin [03:00:36] That was a little something. Right?

Bryan Buchanan [03:00:38] So towards the end, William Law and others are really not happy with the direction that Nauvoo is going. And so their choice is, let's turn to the power of the printing press and create the Nauvoo Expositor.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:00:51] Wait, and really quick. He had tried. William Law had tried to reason with Joseph several times that he went in for an excommunication, then a reason reinstatement. So he had tried multiple ways before this.

Bryan Buchanan [03:01:01] And then Joseph starts referring to a Brutus within our ranks. And William Law is not super curious about who he's referring to, and he's getting concerned. And so they create the Expositor, which has very explosive allegations. This is the first time that someone in Nauvoo is printing the idea of polygamy. Really. And so there is this very heated city council meeting where they say, what are we going to do? And the legal precedent, they think, gives them the right to destroy the printing press. That does not go well in early America. This is a very, very bad idea. And that of any specific incident, that is what creates the chaos in Nauvoo towards the end. Because as a result, he then declares martial law. And people around are like, whoa, you can't go in and destroy the press and then declare martial law because you don't like the results of it. This is un American. This is undemocratic. And that is what really. Thomas Sharpe, down the river in the Warsaw Signal, is incensed at this.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:02:07] If legal scholar and lawyer Dallin H. Oaks is to be believed, he's written a legal defense on why it might have been okay and legal for them to burn the printing press. So if you want to hear the other side, you can look that up.

Bryan Buchanan [03:02:23] And sometimes something might be technically legal and still not a good idea. Read the room, Mormons. This is not going to go well at that point in America.

John Dehlin [03:02:34] Yeah, and I don't think we've mentioned polygamy yet in all of this in terms of his ultimate martyrdom and undoing. Or did we?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:02:41] I mean, polygamy is the Undertone everywhere. I mean, at this point, I like to say, and it's kind of a joke, but it kind of not like Joseph Smith was like the Britney Spears of this time period in the sense that tabloids loved this guy. Like he was making national news at this point. People would come into town just to see this weirdo, right? Like this is the guy. And sometimes people would like him, sometimes people wouldn't. Polygamy was the thing that. That really fueled that he had all these allegations against all of these women. And now I will give faithful apologists this. There are stories of Joseph Smith going in and kidnapping young girls and stealing them away. Like, the anti Mormon literature really starts to amplify this. So, you know, there are some exaggerated stories about Joseph Smith and his behavior towards women, but that was. That was the idea. And you got to think of it now, again, if a group of religious people that you didn't believe their religion came into your town, started taking all the political power, voting in block and having problems with women, you'd be upset and concerned about it too. Did the mob handle it? Did the Warsaw folks handle it? Well, probably not. I mean, they created a martyr is what they did. What I would have liked to see is Joseph Smith go through the legal process and just become a sad old man sitting in jail. That would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails, but it created a martyr, and I think Joseph's behavior helped do that. But polygamy is the underpinnings to all of this. I mean, Joseph Smith would have acquired power voting in block. But I think you could also argue that he might not have been successful in acquiring such loyalty and power if he had created these dynastic ceilings to all these women.

Bryan Buchanan [03:04:31] It is interesting that toward the end of his life, polygamy does recede in the background somewhat, because throughout the history of polygamy, Mormons keep thinking that the bare reasonableness of polygamy will convince anyone. And so when Hyrum takes the revelation to the High Council to read it to them, the thought is, oh, they'll all see the logic. They'll be like, oh, yes, this makes total sense. And for some of them it does. But for some of them, it absolutely does not.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:05:02] Like Brigham Young, he desired the grave when he heard about it.

Bryan Buchanan [03:05:06] One source says that north says that lasted for about two minutes and then he felt light as the air. But after that, it does calm down. And it seems like Joseph Smith realizes, maybe downplay the polygamy a little bit. And after that point he doesn't. He marries me. I think it's one or two wives after that point and that's it.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:05:28] But he doesn't have time.

Bryan Buchanan [03:05:30] Life gets very chaotic after that.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:05:32] I mean, you don't have time. You have 30 plus women at this point. You're running from the law. You are mayor, chancellor of a university. That takes a lot of work. So he. I think that that's part of it. It was just pure chaos by this point. And his paranoia is out of control. He thinks Emma's trying to poison him. He thinks William Law is trying to poison him. William Law thinks Joseph is trying to poison him. Everyone's trying to poison everybody. And then they die in Carthage. The end.

John Dehlin [03:05:59] Yeah, and then he dies. You know, when you think about, like. And I know that historians and academics don't like to use the cult word. And so I'll acknowledge that we need to be thoughtful and careful about how we even introduce the word. But when you think about kind of like the most famous or historic or infamous cults of the 20th century, you know, it's like Heaven's Gate with all the people dying. It's David Koresh and Waco, where everything goes up in a ball of flames. And you think of Jim Jones and the People's Temple of Guyana. It's like, certainly Joseph brought it to the precipice of Mormonism, ending up in some sort of catastrophic death fireball spiral. And it seems like just a couple of things could have happened differently and Mormonism could have been up there with Koresh and with Jim Jones and with Marshall Applewhite. Is that fair to say?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:07:03] I mean, I think that the sad part for me is you think about some average family in the 4th Ward in Nauvoo that, like, came over from England looking for a better life. And they're just woodcutters or potters like Heber Kimball, and they're just living their life. And we're not polygamists. Read the papers. Our Times and Season says we're not polygamists. We're being persecuted. Like, what is life like for them? They're paying the price for Joseph Smith's sins. And that's the frustration I have with Joseph Smith. The ego of it, the hubris of it, that you're making these innocent people who trust you pay for your mistakes. And they are mistakes. Joseph, let's say you believe in polygamy. You don't think that's a mistake? Well, what about the Kirtland Safety Society? What about the forgeries? What about the Voting in blocks. What about the. The countless tactical errors he made on even planning the city? Like people had to pay for those things. And to me, that says that his power was unchecked. It was dangerous. So call it whatever you want to call. Certainly fits patterns. Again, if you see modern fundamentalists, Mormon sects that have gone awry, who are trying to restore the restoration and restore Joseph Smith and follow exactly his writing, it's not good. It's not good. It's not. It's breaking the law. And that's why there's so many problems with it. So to say it was a different time and it was just misunderstood and persecuted for the church. Like, that's not the truth either. So, fine, you don't like the cult word, but then get away from the persecution word too, because those two are not, you know, complete labels.

Bryan Buchanan [03:08:46] Yeah, well, in your comment about if things had gone just a little differently, as much as Mormons, the dark cloud of Carthage, that was probably the best thing that could have happened for Mormonism generally, because if David Koresh leaves the compound there at Waco and is jailed somewhere else and is killed there or whatever, that story turns out very differently. If Joseph Smith holes up in Nauvoo and refuses to leave, Nauvoo plot probably glows up in flames too. So him going to Carthage was the best option.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:09:21] And we call this Buchanan's Law. And I really want this to take off. So everyone just use it. Buchanan's Law. Even though I'm the one that always does it. Whenever you bring up Joseph Smith and Warren Jeffs, it's called Buchanan's Law, named after Brian Buchanan. If you look at Warren Jeffs right now, what has happened with our church, it's really interesting because we're seeing a sect of about the same amount of people that were in Nauvoo. So Nauvoo was 10 to 12,000 people. FLD, same numbers. It's interesting to watch that church crumble in real time. They arrested Warren Jeffs. He's been in prison now for over a decade. And to see what is happening to the church, he's tried to make himself a martyr for many years. And for many of its family, it's worked. He's this pious man who is just being persecuted by the government, but the church is falling apart. People are wising up. Not as fast as I would like. They're. There are still a lot of tragic things happening within that community, but really it's losing all the air because there's not a martyr for it. You've got new guys cropping up, like Samuel Bateman, who are trying to be these new leaders, but it's notit doesn't have the same impact as if Warren Jeffs had been, you know, like a lamb to the slaughter or whatever story. And he's trying. You see him trying to do that, because a martyr does codify that. And so that. That's the tricky part in how we deal with these things, because Joseph Smith was clearly breaking the law and creating, I think, a lot of criminal behaviors and deserved to be held accountable for that. But when you do that, how do you do that to not inflame persecution complex? And that's the tricky thing that I don't think society has figured out.

John Dehlin [03:10:59] Yeah, Well, I just remember when I was really starting to learn the history. This is just 15, 20 years ago. And simultaneously, I see the Going Clear documentary about L. Ron Hubbard and David Miskovich. And again, I've learned about Jim Jones and Keith Ranieri and David Koresh and Bhagawan Sri Rajneesh and Warren Jeffs. I think at some point, someone's got to write, I want some faithful. I remember when the cult word started coming up, and I'm not beating on this drum. I just remember when that word came up, it was just like, no, no, no, you don't use that word. Joseph Smith's in a totally different category. He doesn't belong anywhere in the discussion of L. Ron Hubbard or Scientology or Jehovah's Witnesses or Jim Jones. Like, he was still one of the good guys, and all these other dudes were really, really bad. And I just want to say I want some thoughtful historian who's faithful to line up the behaviors, the results, the teachings, the activities, the sexual shenanigans, the financial shenanigans, the legal shenanigans. I want them to line up, you know, Keith Bernieri, David Koresh, Warren Jeffs, L. Ron Hubbard, David Miskovich, Warren Jeffs, Joseph Smith, and tell me what the meaningful difference is between all of them. And again, use the word cult or not like it's problematic. Right.

Reflecting on Mormonism, Cults, and Legacy

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:12:35] Well, let me tell you how I. So that word comes up a lot. And so I need to say, first and foremost, I am a Mormon. I'm part of the Mormon tradition. I'm a Mormon historian, and I study fundamentalism. That said, I never grew up in a fundamentalist sect. So whenever I talk about fundamentalist sects, I'm still speaking somewhat as an outsider. We have a shared history, heritage, even ancestors. So I try to be cognizant of that. But I will say that when someone that comes from a tradition, whether it be the LDs or the FLDS or some, you know, flavor of Mormonism and says, I left a cult, it is not my job to say, no, no, no, don't say that word. You can't say that word. People get to define their experience however they want to define it. And I'm sorry, it's kind of a spectrum. You can talk to folks who grew up in the Jeffs group who, it wasn't so bad and they left early and whatever. It was just, you know, it is what it is. They were never into it. Same thing with lds. You can also talk to LDS people, and I know many of them who have had horrific cult experiences. So. So for us to define how people define their own experiences is not our business. And that's where I stand. If you want to call, if you said you grew up in a cult, if that's what it felt like to you, that makes sense to me. I think having historians do it becomes problematic because then it's like me defining, you know, this is what this group is. And so I think that's why historians have to stay away from that. Because. Well, as Shirley Draper, who up. Grew up in the flds, talks about, she has written some papers on this for John Whitmer. Right. No dialogue. Where did Shirley Draper publish her cult paper? Look up Shirley Draper's idea. She wrote a critique of under the Banner of Heaven, and she disagrees with the portrayal of the show and I.

John Dehlin [03:14:22] The movie or the book or both?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:14:23] Both. Both. She feels like it does harm to the community. And she's a friend of mine, and I respect her and I respect her research. And she, she says, and I agree with. With when we use language like that, makes it harder for insiders to leave. And. And I've seen that. So if you are, it's the backfire effect, I'm guessing.

John Dehlin [03:14:44] Yeah.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:14:44] If you're in a persecution complex, it gives, you know, them everything they need to dismiss you. Because now you're using this word. If you would have told me that I grew up in a cult as an LDS woman, I would have been like, I don't need to look, listen to you anymore. That's a crazy thing to say. So I think it's a nuanced discussion. There's not a good answer to it. But I think certainly Joseph Smith followed patterns that we see now in an organization and how he accrued power and how he administered power and how he punished dissenters. And so for me, I think that there are a lot of similarities. So I don't mind anymore. I used to shy away from comparing him to Warren Jeffs because people would be like, oh, he's not the same at all. And it's true. Joseph Smith did not do a lot of. Warren Jeffs has done some unspeakable things to children and to families that Joseph Smith never did. And so the comparisons don't work there, but they work for a lot of things. They work for a lot of things. And by design, Warren Jeffs is literally taking his words and trying to recreate them. So I think people need to be a little kinder in that discussion. Instead of pointing fingers. You can't use that word or you should use that word. It's complicated. These are painful systems. And as we talked about with even the plural wives, to call it rape is complicated because not all experiences are created equal and not all how people process their experiences are created equal. So it's hard to like label it. And yet it's also hard to have conversations where you don't label it. So I just think there needs to be. Be so much more compassion in these discussions rather than judgment. Ex Mormons just sit around in boundary maintenance and police how we talk about these conversations. And I've been part of this, for the record, like, this is part of my unhealthy habits of Mormonism that I've had to unpack over the years. Like to be this finger wagging, like, you shouldn't use that word and you shouldn't say that. Who am I to tell people how to contextualize their experience? So that's where I stand on the cult debate. It's complicated and nuanced. Context is important. Where we situate is important. And it's a messy thing. And so we gotta let people have some space to be a little messy about it.

John Dehlin [03:16:52] Love it. Anything you want to add, Brian?

Bryan Buchanan [03:16:55] No, I'm out.

John Dehlin [03:16:57] Okay.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:16:57] He doesn't like this discussion.

John Dehlin [03:16:59] Okay. Well, I hope you understand the spirit with which I discuss it. I don't want to create more polarization and division, but, you know, I'm trying to make sense of this like everybody else. You know what I mean?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:17:13] Bryan, do you want to say anything about how you view history in this regard?

Bryan Buchanan [03:17:19] It's hard. And Mormon history is a particularly difficult one. We mentioned this earlier. So much of Mormon history devolves into it's true or it's not, which is a discussion, but it's not necessarily a history discussion. And so that. And you can Mix. As long as you go into it knowing you're mixing. I get a little concerned sometimes when apologetics wanders around masquerading as history, and vice versa. History dips into being apologetic. And so that discussion I'm a not very good at, and I have very little of value to add.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:18:01] And that's what's so on our podcast. I've said some harsh. I've said what I really feel here, and I try to be open about my biases so people can discuss. But when we're talking history, we don't speculate about this kind of stuff. We tell you the stories, and sometimes we'll, you know, editorialize. But I do think as historians, it's important for people to go with the evidence that they have, tell the story that they have, and let people do what they will with it. And that's what we try to do, but it's hard. It's a high stakes religion. I invested everything in it. Of course I have feelings about it. And you know what? I get to have feelings about it. What I don't get to do is hold my feelings up as truth. That's a very Mormon thing. We think if we feel it, it must be true. And sadly, that's not the truth.

John Dehlin [03:18:47] Yeah, beautiful. Well, this has been an amazing first discussion. I think think we should probably just have Joseph Smith's life being the bookends for part one, and then if. If I'm able to, the frontier stuff's the best stuff. I know. That's why. That's why that's the cliffhanger for part two. Because how in the world did Mormonism survive as a movement? Right? And maybe polygamy was an important part of not just its formation, but of its continuance after Joseph's death. Smith.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:19:19] Maybe everybody cares about the Joseph Smith stuff. And I'm like, you have not the Utah period. It will blow your mind. But he feels that way lies the

Bryan Buchanan [03:19:26] rise of fundamentalist history is the fun.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:19:28] Part three, you. This was just a appetizer.

John Dehlin [03:19:32] Wait, are you. Are you both saying you ain't. To our audience, you ain't seen nothing yet?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:19:36] Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

John Dehlin [03:19:37] Okay, it gets better. Is this like the Godfather where the

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:19:41] sequel is moving along fine until we hit the Utah period? And then all of a sudden, and I'm like, wait, what? My mind goes, yeah, it's crazy, crazy time.

John Dehlin [03:19:48] So more. So more to come before we end. I want to give you both the chance to promote any cause, including benchmark books and Sunstone. And your podcast, because I've got people out there that donate, that have money to give, that want to support, and they don't always know how to support or who needs support. So, Lindsay, I'll have you go first. Plug all the things that people who are looking to support something can support and how they can do it.

Closing Thoughts, Book Recommendations, and Ways to Help

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:20:15] Thank you. I appreciate that. Well, the first thing I would say is I want to ask everyone out there to promote better conversations. In the last few years, I've seen a really hard landscape of discourse. We've all seen it, and I think we're tired of it. Mormonism and Mormon studies is an ecosystem of which we all participate. And we all have strong feelings and grudges and problems. And I think anywhere that we can have conversations with people we disagree with is important. We have to stretch ourselves past our comfort zones, reach into this sort of polemic space and be better and have better manners. So that's my first thing. If you're gonna do that, talk about these things. I know they're painful and they're high stakes, but let's try to hold space for people. We try to do that at Sunstone. So if that sounds good to you, you can support us. We have the Sunstone Mormon History podcast. Brian and I put so much time into it. We spend all day long going to the archives. We're not just reading articles. We are doing archival research. We need your support. It's important that we tell a history that's as complete as possible.

John Dehlin [03:21:23] How do people donate to Sunstone podcast?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:21:25] What is sunstone.org and leave a donation that helps us.

John Dehlin [03:21:28] Can they become like a monthly donor?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:21:30] We have recurring donations. Always help. And you can earmark it for the. For the podcast and just listen. Give it a chance. Listen to a history that is in depth and complicated and complex. I think that that helps us all. And year of Plug me, of course, I still put stuff out. I just redid the site. I've been re putting on servers. It's a lot like, I'm a single mom. I hate to give the pity party card, but it's hard. It's hard being a single mom, doing all this stuff on my own, figuring it out and trying to run this website like, I don't know what I'm doing, as people can see with the tech issues of year of polygamy. So thank you to all the people who've supported me over the years.

John Dehlin [03:22:10] So can people donate to your polygamy?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:22:11] You still can donate to your polygamy. So I would say that and if you want to help fundamentalists, I always say cherish families is the, is the organization. Shirley Draper runs it. She's on the ground and she does a lot of good work there. Holding out help is another organization that helps, helps like people that are getting out, just getting out of the flds. So there are some good organizations there. I'm trying to think of any, anything else that is really good, but really, really give your money to those causes. Help help people doing that. But if you can, if you want to help me personally, help Sunstone or Uropoligamy, because that's where I spend a lot of my time.

John Dehlin [03:22:48] And Sunstone does events. Not just the summer symposium, but aren't there some regional events? Events?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:22:53] Yeah, we have an event coming up in the uk. We do that every year. We have a great event.

John Dehlin [03:22:57] Samantha just texted me, John, you won't believe.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:22:59] And you, you came to our first two.

John Dehlin [03:23:02] I've come to two and one in Canada.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:23:04] John helped us start our first Sunstone group in the uk and then came the second time. And it's that group. There's nobody like them. I mean, anyone can go to the uk. If you want to go to a fun group of Mormons, go to the uk. Sunstone. We have events. Brian and I are gonna be doing a few podcast events. We're looking at one to tour Idaho. This, this story of Idaho Mormonism is crazy. We're going to do one in Nauvoo coming up where you can stay in the Nauvoo Mansion, sorry, the Nauvoo House with us and tour Nauvoo. So you can find all of that on our website@senseone.org and of course, Stephen Carter, our magazine editor, has a podcast as well where they're much more thoughtful in their discussion on Mormon issues, social issues, not just history. And so that you can find that@sunstone.org as well.

John Dehlin [03:23:48] Beautiful. All right. Support all those things. And Bryan, how can people support you? And also benchmark books, read books, all

Bryan Buchanan [03:23:56] these historians we've been talking about. So I wanted to mention a few of the books that are useful to us, that are helpful to people. So there's a one volume overview called Mormon Polygamy by Richard Van Wagner. That's excellent. Another one that's more recent called American Polygamy by Craig Foster and Marianne Watson. But then you have Top Conference Classic and Sacred Loneliness, the biographies of all these women. Absolutely fantastic. A House Full of Females, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Excellent. The three volume series, Persistence of Polygamy edited by our Friends, Newell Bringhurst and Craig Foster. Excellent work in that. Brian Hale's trilogy. Joseph Smith's Polygamy. There is so, so much. And then you also have biographies of some of the individuals. Mormon Enigma, one of our favorite books. So there's a lot. If people are interested in Mormon, more general topics, more specific studies of things, there's a lot. So come by the store here.

John Dehlin [03:24:47] Didn't George Smith put out something?

Bryan Buchanan [03:24:49] Nauvoo Polygamy. George's Nauvoo.

John Dehlin [03:24:50] Did he mention that?

Bryan Buchanan [03:24:51] Yep.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:24:51] That's got a great chart of all the wives.

Bryan Buchanan [03:24:53] The chart in the back is fantastic. Every known Nauvoo era polygamist is in there.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:24:58] Tell them about your book, Brian. Which one? Either one. The ones that you've helped edit. Brian, by the way, edits books and doesn't ever tell me about it. He's done one on theology and the one that you just did for Mormon Stories.

Bryan Buchanan [03:25:14] So, yeah, I added a collection on theological topics which was a little outside of my normal, but called Continuing Revelation, published by Signature Books. And then when we came on with Gary and talked about his justice and Mercy, that's a fantastic study of some interesting folks.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:25:30] Brian is the most unassuming person ever. One day he sends me a picture of him holding this cute little baby and I'm like, that's a cute baby. Turns out Brian had a baby. No one told us Brian had a baby. Brian writes books Hortem at Benchmark Books. Tell him about your nerd project, your transcription.

Bryan Buchanan [03:25:45] I'm constantly transcribing things. So a project that we have pitched on the podcast, we've got some traction, but we could use some more folks. There was a woman during the Leonard Arrington years named Edith Romney who spent her life largely as a volunteer, transcribing thousands of pages of documents that otherwise are just in the originals. And so we've got the Edith Romney Society, where we'd like people to help transcribe all this great stuff that's out there. So we've got a website with project ideas of how people can help. So we've tinkered around with AI. How can AI help?

John Dehlin [03:26:25] What's the website?

Bryan Buchanan [03:26:26] Edithromneysociety.blogspot.com okay, so just Google Edith Romney Society.

John Dehlin [03:26:33] And it goes without saying, or maybe we should say, that if people want to buy all these books on polygamy, they should go to Benchmark Books to buy the books. Is that right?

Bryan Buchanan [03:26:41] Come by the store. We're here in Salt Lake. Our website, we ship all over benchmarkbooks.com we also have author events. We've got Richard Bushman coming to the store very soon. So all of these historians that you've known and loved, you can come meet them in person.

John Dehlin [03:26:57] Yeah, yeah. And, you know, people used to always go visit Gerald and Sandra Tanner at Utah Lighthouse Ministry. That's no more. But Benchmark Books should be on your list of places to visit when you come to Salt Lake, like Julia. It's a fun place to show up. Now, Ann Wild's not there anymore. Is that right?

Bryan Buchanan [03:27:14] We'll see an Wild come in every now and again, but, yeah, they're an Wild spottings.

John Dehlin [03:27:18] Yeah, but Brian's there, and that should be enough.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:27:20] Come hang out with me and Chris people. And they always have wild dog documents. You always have something fun in there. Old documents to find.

John Dehlin [03:27:27] And they sell rare documents in rare books, right?

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:27:30] Yeah. If you got a lot of money and want to buy expensive documents.

Bryan Buchanan [03:27:34] John C. Bennett's expose.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:27:35] If you have cool documents you want to sell there, you guys come see us.

John Dehlin [03:27:40] Shout out to Chris Bench as well, who's carried on that beautiful tradition that his father, Kurt, started.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:27:46] Can I say one more thing? I forgot. So I was having a conversation with a church historian and who's a great friend to history, and we were talking about encouraging people who out there have diaries or documents, journals of their family. We want you to get those archived. It's important to get those archived. So if you have stuff, if you're sitting on it, go to. There are a few places you can get them archived. Take it to the University of Utah. If you don't trust the church, if you do trust the church, our friend Rob Jensen is a great person.

John Dehlin [03:28:21] That's Robin.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:28:22] Robin. He's a good guy with integrity. You never have to lose sight of your documents. They will archive them and give you their originals. We just want you to get your stuff archived. Take it to Claremont, take it to Utah Tech. There are places in Virginia that you can take it to get your stuff.

John Dehlin [03:28:39] Maybe usu.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:28:40] Usu, thank you. Get your stuff archived. Please, please, please, please don't let it be thrown away. If you're leaving the church and you're angry and you want to throw away documents, please don't do it.

John Dehlin [03:28:50] We're talking journals and old documents from your great grandparents, that kind of thing.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:28:53] That's right. That's right. We see a lot of people throw that stuff away. And please, please do not do that.

Bryan Buchanan [03:28:59] Be a mercenary, come sell it to us and we'll get it archived.

John Dehlin [03:29:03] Right? All right. Well, today was dynamite, so thank you. Lindsay Henson Park Today was fantastic. Thanks for coming on Mormon Stories. Thanks for all you do for our community. You just do so many amazing things. Thank you.

Lindsay Hansen Park [03:29:17] Thank you for having me on.

John Dehlin [03:29:19] Yeah. And Brian, you, too. I hope you'll come back. You're always a joy to have.

Bryan Buchanan [03:29:24] Absolutely.

John Dehlin [03:29:25] All right. Thanks, everyone. Thanks for joining us. And just remember, this is just part one of a two and possibly three part series. And who knows what else the future will will bring to all of us and all the goodness. But thanks for joining us. Be good to each other. Be kind to each other. We'll see you all again soon on another episode of Mormon Stories podcast. Take care.

Transcript © 2026 John P. Dehlin. All rights reserved. Brief quotations are welcome with attribution and a link to mormonstories.org; all other use requires written permission.